Notes on the Kaifeng Jews

 

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Notes on the Kaifeng Jews

The Jews of Venice

 

Harry Freedman writes excellent popular books on Jewish subjects, and his Shylock's Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice's Jews is no different.  The Venice Jewish community looms large in the annals of Jewish history; it was surprising to me that they never numbered more than five thousand.  Read this book and learn about their sustained success in a time and place which should have prevented them from becoming a great Jewish society.

A Counter Narrative

 

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon is a very engaging build, decentered the male-centric game of biology at every turn.  Bohannon creates a compelling counter-narrative of the centrality of the female body in mammals.  At times rare time the theories propounded here seem a bit far-fetched, but this does not take from the overall excellent research.

Octavia Butler's Kindred

 

Certainly there is much to be said about Butler's work, but Kindred fell short of my expectations.  I tried, and stopped, reading this novel several times, and decided I would read it regardless.  It was difficult to understand the mechanism of the time travel (yes, it just happens).  That is fine, but reality was never suspended for me.  The novel felt like a forced exploration of a topic that is important, and probably hard to write, but in there somewhere.  It is just hard to see what Butler was after in this novel.

Tanners Pond Revisited

Cherry Valley Road sits in a small valley for much of its course.  Like Tanner Valley, Cherry Valley moves in a north south orientation:

It runs from the intersection of 11^th Street, all the way down to southern border of the village.  We can see the slight valley on this typographical map in the deeper green color:

At the north end of Cherry Valley Avenue are some of the “steep” hills we see in the north end of Tanners Valley:

The dry valley of Cherry Valley Road quickly becomes a stream just south of the village:

 

As detailed in Hidden Waters this stream flows down to Valley Stream Brook.  

Looking at the map further out there are only two dry valleys in Garden City:

Tanners Pond to the left, and Cherry Valley to the right, cross both the north and south border of Garden City.

Hidden Waters says this about the terminal point of Cherry Valley:

“To the north of Hempstead Turnpike on Cherry Valley Avenue, there is a public works storage yard. Often, public utilities such as salt storage, depots and garages used by local governments stand at sites once used for pumping stations, as I’ve found with the Kissena Park DOT storage yard.”

This is the Village of Garden City’s Department of Public Works Yard.  Just north of it is the Garden City Pool.  When I was a child trash was still being burned in the yard.   Sometimes when swimming, charred paper would fly into the pool.

 

This part of southern Garden City juts out unlike the other, more rectangular lines on the borders.  Could this have been a pumping station?  The 1926 aerial photo shows the outlines of the street only:

The 1950 aerial views shows more development, and perhaps the first buildings to become the pool, but no buildings where the municipal yard is now located.    

 

The Mystery of Tanners Pond: an investigation

 

I was in second grade in 1978, in Garden City, New York, and Mrs. Tiernan taught us local history.  Down a very small slope from our school, was a street named Tanners Pond Road:

 

It runs from the northern border of GC, down to village’s waist.  From there, it picks up the name Edgemere Road:

Edgemere ends at the southern border of the village.  Mrs. Tiernan told us there was a pond in or at Tanners Pond Road.  She taught us that tanneries are smelly and need lots of water to operate.  This is true, but was there really a pond at Tanners Pond Road?  Is this true?

I think I have marshalled enough evidence to prove that there was a watercourse from the north of Tanners Pond Road to the south of Edgemere Road.  Here is the evidence:

The elevation above sea level of my old house is 96ft:

Tanners Pond Road is at the bottom of a slight valley at 77ft:

Several blocks passed the road the tiny valley reaches 96ft again:

So Tanners Pond Road sits in a valley that is nearly 20ft deep.  Interestingly, the elevation at the north end of Tanners Pond Road is 86ft:

And at the southern end the elevation is 69ft:

I have measured at the base of a small pond at the Garden City Country Club Gold Course for reasons I will explain below.  So, both Tanners Pond and Edgemere Road run through a north-south a slope that loses 17 feet in elevation.

So these roads sit in a valley of about 20 feet, and slope gently but firmly from north to south.  This is in keeping with the geography of Long Island.  The North Shore of Nassau County’s highest point is Harbor Hill at 350 feet.  The South Shore tappers off to sea level.  You can see one particularly “steep” slope of the valley here, at the northern end of Tanners Pond Road:

The elevation is 94ft just beyond the top of the hill, where the slope levels off, and on Tanners Pond Road, it is 83ft, so Tanners Valley here is 11ft deep.  The slope of this valley is considerable gentler elsewhere, and is not highly visible on Google Street view.

That is the evidence from elevation and topography.  There are two small, but important pieces of evidence from names. Tanners Pond Road has an obvious connection with water, but so does the name this road takes on from the mid-to south side of the village.  Edgemere is an Anglo-Saxon word that means by the water’s edge.  The road was probably named this because it skirted water or a marshy area.

Indeed, to the east of Edgemere Road is the golf course of the Garden City Country Club is two water courses and a connecting stream:

The pond to the north is filled with water, while the connecting stream and the pond to the south is dry.  There is also a water filled pond to the east.

The water filled pond to the north has a culvert with exterior stone work that appears to run beneath Edgemere Rad to the north and info the pond.  We can see it is it this photo:

And from above:

This pond has a more “natural” appearance in that the visible banks are deep, showing patterns of erosion that may be indicative of water flow.

The other pond to the east appears to be human made, or at least managed:

It has a raised berm and an aerator.  In the dry pond to the south, there is a culvert leading out of the golf course:

It is extremely difficult to say if this culvert simply leads to water drains or continues as a water course to the south.  There are suggestions that it does.  South 2.3 miles is the Franklin Square Museum.  On this property, a culvert emerges from the north:

This is the headwaters of Valley Stream Brook, which continues, with some dips under the ground, until it empties into Jamaica Bay:

I am not claiming that the valley at Tanners Pond Road, or the ponds at the Garden City Country Club are the sources of Valley Stream Brook.  However, I believe the Tanners Valley is one of the seasonal brooks that once fed Valley Stream Brooks.

Garden City was built on the Hempstead Plains.  This 60,000 acre grassland was formed by the outwash debris of the glacial hills to the north.  Streams and creeks running south from these hills created the outwash, sandy plain that would become the Hempstead Plains.

In an article THE HEMPSTEAD PLAINS OF LONG ISLAND, by Roland M. Harper

In the journal Torreya, December, 1912, Vol. 12, No. 12 (December, 1912), pp. 277-287, the author discusses these ancient stream beds:

The surface of the Hempstead Plains, like the rest of the southern or unglaciated portion of Long Island, is for the most part very flat, and slopes gently southward at the rate of about one foot in 300. It ranges in altitude from about 60 to 200 feet above sea-level. Traversing the plain in a general north and south direction are a number of nearly straight broad shallow valleys, ten to twenty feet in depth, which are believed by geologists to have been formed by glacial streams and not by recent erosion. Within the limits of the prairie most of these valleys are now dry at all seasons, but farther south some of them contain permanent streams.”

In this same article, the author provides a photograph looking up from one of these dry valleys:

It is hard to get a sense of scale, but we are probably safe to say he is looking up from an incline similar to the one I show above. 

The evidence points toward the Tanners Pond Road valley as not ever being a pond.  In fact, a historical market in Garden City points to a different location for the pond:

Tanners Pond Rd. connected Courthouse Rd., which originated in Franklin Square, to the Tanner property [which had a pond], west of New Hyde Park Rd. and north of what is now Marcus Avenue near Lake Success.

If the information behind this sign is correct, then the road is named after the Tanner family, who had property to the north and west of the area that is currently named after them, and their pond.  So, my second grade teacher was somewhat correct.  There was a Tanner’s Pond, but it was named after a family, and not an occupation.  It is also in the wrong area.  Why, then, was this road called Tanners Pond Road.  Did it continue to run north along what is now Denton and Marcus Avenue?

In the article from 1912 this bit of information is crucial: “Within the limits of the prairie most of these valleys are now dry at all seasons, but farther south some of them contain permanent streams.”  This is exactly what occurs in the Tanner Valley.   The valley is dry, but in the very south, those who created the golf course probably utilized the old stream bed and its occasion flow to build two, or possibly three ponds.  Further south, as this valley feeds into Valley Stream Brook, the flowing water begins in fits and starts until it is the kind of permanent stream detailed in 1912.

This valley, and those like it, began to be formed 10,000 years ago.  The Tanner Valley may be an old feature indeed.

The "Tanner" Valley in 1926

The valley also continues north to the Manhasset Hills:

The light blue color indicates a lower elevation than the surrounding green.

Survival of the Lucky?

 

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a ringside seat to the revolution occurring in the study of human origins.  In a way, this revolution has been occurring since the heliocentric theory of the solar system became widespread. The earth-centric world envisioned people as the center of the universe.  Existence existed for us.

Since then, the hallowed centrality of homo sapiens has been on the defensive.  For sometime this seems not to be the case.  The theory of evolution was widely misread regarding modern humans.  We were here because we were smarter, better, and faster than other hominids who are long gone.  Even in a decentered world we maintained our primacy.  

But the recent DNA evidence of interbreeding between homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and Neanderthals and Denisovans, shows that the dividing line between hominids was and is fuzzy.  If you can breed with another species, are they really another species?  

And now a book like this, which further illustrate that Neanderthals were quite like us.  Our survival and their extinction seem less preordained the more we learn about these people and their abilities.  Survival seems more about who is lucky, than who is fit. 

Second Temple Judaism

 

Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism by Malka Zeiger Simkovich is a refreshing walk though the Second Temple written record. This time was a time of transition (most times are) so it is great to see the different ideas and shades of Judaism that existed in once place.  The Judaism of that day spanned the entire range of the Greco-Roman world, and then some.  We should all be aware of this!

A Straight Up Narrative

 

I tried to read the go to book on the Salem witch trials, but it was too confusing.  The narrative was convoluted.  Instead, try A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, by Emerson W. Baker.  The writer brings us into this world, but we don’t drown in it.  Also, the author is not wedded to any one theory of the ‘cause’ of the trials.  This is not a book that purports to ‘solve’ the cause of the witch trial with some wacky theory.  There is no one cause.  It was a complex event, with multiple origins  You will read that, and more in this excellent account. 

Beneath our Feet

 

Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs by Sergey Kadinsky is a guide book, in a way, to New York City before it was one of the largest cities in the world.  This is a book about the effacement of nature beneath the city, and how to find those traces that remain.  As such, it is a book that examines mysteries buried beneath our feet.

Educational & Effortless

 

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer, is an excellent account of China’s vast and confusing array of ethnic “minorities” to the west and south of the Middle Kingdom.  Eimer is both well versed in both contemporary and historical Chinese that reading this is effortless and educational at the same time.   

The Scattered Future?

 

Scattered Among The Nations, by Bryan Schwartz, Jay Sand, and Sandy Carter is a gentle investigation of various groups around the world who are already Jews but isolated, or groups that are isolated and are rapidly becoming Jews.  This book is about the little known process of "Judaization,” although the authors never use that word.  It is interesting to think that these groups may be part of the future of Judaism.

Getting Caught up with the Dead Sea Scrolls

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books) by John J. Collins is part of an excellent and readable series of how to read, or what to expect from reading, great religious books.  Another great biography in this series is on the Talmud.  For someone like me, who paid close attention to the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1990s, when there was a great deal of controversy concerning the dissemination and publication of the scrolls, this volume is a great way to get caught up without diving too deeply into details.

Sacred Courtyard?

 

Sacred Treasure - The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic by Rabbi Mark S. Glickman is a compelling history of the Cairo Genizah.  The similarly titled Sacred Trash is also about the genizah and is a good companion to this book.  

Odd that I did not know this (or forgot) this: the entire contents of the genizah were removed and put in the courtyard of the Ben Ezra Synagogue a few years before Schechter arrived, due to a badly needed renovation of the shul.  The image of the genizah has always been as a place hidden from view for centuries. How did such delicate documents hold up on the transport to the courtyard?

 

Suffering and More Suffering

 

Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War is an near daily account of the battle that destroyed the French and opened the way for the partition of Vietnam.  It is detailed, but also a compelling read. The suffering was tremendous, and for the Vietnamese people, it would continue.

Judaism for the Intellect

 

Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism: Secrets of "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Micah Goodman is less about the secrets of the Guide, and more about the heavy lifting the Ramban accomplished in this work.  As Goodman says in the subtitle of this book, the Guide did change Judaism.  The Rambam set a high mark on mature, thoughtful Judaism – a Judaism of the head (and the heart) we so desperately need.

The Broad Definition of a "Gypsy"

 

I read No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers, by Katharine Quarmby, in part to learn about modern Roma life.  This book, however, is not strictly about the Roma, although they are featured.  Rather, it is about a confusing (for an American) array of road people in Britain.   These people seemed to have caused much consternation among settled peoples in the 1990s and early 2000s.  This is their story.

A Monumental Work

letter in the Rambam's hand

 

Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed entranced me as a younger man, and I have read portions of it several times.  However, I read though the entire book this time, and I have some new insights.  Yes, the Guide is about the “secrets” of the Torah, but it is much more than that.  This book is really an ambitious attempt to define and redefine all of Judaism.  It is that monumental work.  I won’t take so long to read it entirely again.

The Necessity of Exile

 

The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid is an important book. As the title suggests, Magid sees the Jewish exile as necessary; it is not some state of existence that will one day be amended by Zionism.  If you have an open mind and want to learn about topics that might distress you, as a Jew, but are vital, read this book.  

Another Ghost Story?

 

North Woods: A Novel by Daniel Mason, is an excellent, very accomplished work.  Although it would seem that it would fall into clichés, the old house passing from person to person, it largely does not.  I hoped it would not become a novel about ghosts, as that seemed a cliché too far.  Alas… despite that, this is a compelling novel that keeps you reading.