Guston, Judith Marla2020-06-222020-06-221999http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/27261There is a paucity of scholarship addressing the material life of eighteenth-century American Jews, in part because there is little extant material from this period that can be identified as specifically Jewish. Many of the objects that do survive appear to be similar to those owned and used within the broader culture. Some scholars have described Jewish identity in the period as either wholly assimilative or as divided into privately expressed and publicly hidden Jewishness. ☐ This thesis examines two pocket almanacs, one for the year 1777 and the other for 1779, that contain the annotations of Michael Gratz (1740-1811), a Jewish merchant in Philadelphia. Prominent among the inscriptions in the 1777 almanac is a Hebrew calendar. The 1779 almanac, absent a Hebrew calendar, invokes the question of assimilation. ☐ The thesis finds that the almanacs provide a means of interpreting identity through material culture. The discussion traces the nexus of relationships, both material and historic, implied by the almanacs and their annotations to address the relationship of the calendar to Gratz's expression of Jewish identity. The almanacs and their calendars can also be contextualized in the broader culture of the period. Based on such an examination, the thesis describes Gratz's expression of identity as one that is porous, or simultaneously expressive of two cultures. It also finds that this porosity was not a construct unique to Jews in the eighteenth century, but, as other American calendars of the period suggest, was a temporal and cultural experience familiar to nearly all Americans. The expression of Jewish identity through a temporal construct manifest materially in the calendar was, therefore, a declaration of identity that could be understood by Jews and non-Jews alike.Gratz, Michael, 1740-1811Jews -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia -- History -- 18th centuryJews -- IdentityAlmanacs, AmericanJewish calendarThesis1159225919