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The Adventures of Joachim (Hayyim) Gans – the first professing Jew in North America

Author: Published on: Published in: Personalities

(Author: Gabriel A. Sivan, Vol. 70, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2015)

 

Standard works on Jewish history have fostered the impression that the first Jews to arrive in North America were refugees from Pernambuco (Recife), a short-lived Dutch colony in Brazil subsequently recaptured by the intolerant Portuguese. Mostly Sephardim, these fugitives from the Inquisition disembarked in New Amsterdam from a French privateer, the Sainte-Catherine, in early September 1654.1Although their arrival is said to have marked the beginning of Jewish settlement and communal life in the United States, they were not the first Jews in North America. That distinction must be credited to Joachim (Hayyim) Gans, a mining engineer and metallurgist from Prague, whose revolutionary techniques earned him an invitation to England from the Society of Mines Royal in 1581.

While gathering material for the North American chapter of The Jewish Emigrant from Britain,2 I came across the story of Joachim Gans and his adventurous career in the late 16th Century. Anglo-Jewish historians such as Israel Abrahams knew that Gans was brought to England from Bohemia in order to make vital improvements in the nation’s mining industry at a time when conflict with Spain was brewing.3 They found evidence of his activity in England but were not aware of his role in a scientific expedition to ‘Virginia’, backed by Sir Walter Raleigh, which made him the first professing Jew to set foot in North America.4

Historical background: the Jews in Bohemia

We cannot begin to appreciate the significance of these events without outlining their historical background. Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages Jews living there suffered recurrent massacres and expulsions. In the early 16th Century, however, their position began to improve as Renaissance ideas took hold in Central Europe. Hebrew printing flourished in Prague, where Gershom Kohen’s press rolled out many works, including an edition of the Passover Haggadah with its famous woodcuts (1526). There was further improvement during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg (1576–1612), a tolerant ruler who made Prague his capital and surrounded himself with artists and men of learning. Some Jews became wealthy and influential, Jewish culture prospered, and great rabbis lived and taught there – notably R. Judah Löw ben Bezalel (c. 1520–1609), the celebrated Maharal of Prague, a mathematician as well as a Talmudist and theologian, whose association with the fashioning of a golembecame a popular legend. One of the Maharal’s disciples was David Gans, who wrote works on astronomy, mathematics and the recording of Jewish and general history.5

Joachim Gans and the Bohemian mining industry

There is no lack of information about David ben Shlomo Gans (1541-1613). A native of Lippstadt in Westphalia, he studied rabbinics in Germany and under R. Moshe Isserles (Rema) in Cracow before moving to Prague in 1564. He then engaged in secular studies and worked alongside Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler at the city’s astronomical observatory. Far less is known about Joachim (Hayyim) Gans, who was born in Prague around 1550, but the fact that both men pursued activities exceptional among Jews of their time does suggest that they were closely related. Their outlook was based on scientific enquiry and they “not only accepted the revolutionary ideas of the Renaissance but put them into practice — David in the field of astronomy and mathematics and Joachim in mineralogy and metallurgy”.6

Joachim Gans received his training in the Erzgbirge (Ore Mountains) straddling the border between Saxony and Bohemia. This was a German-speaking region noted for its mining and smelting operations. Silver mined there was often minted on the spot. One silver coin, the Joachimsthaler, owed its name to the Joachim Valley where it was minted and that name was eventually shortened to Thaler, a designation for any silver coin, which became the American dollar. Copper was also mined in the region and Gans became an expert in metallurgy, the technique of extracting various metals from their ores. His knowledge of advanced smelting techniques brought him to the notice of powerful men in England who already employed mineral specialists and metallurgists from Germany and Austria.7

Working in England (1581-1585)

For both economic and political reasons, the English authorities were anxious to develop their mining industry so as to make the country independent of foreign supplies. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth gave the monopoly over mining and smelting gold, silver, mercury and copper in Wales and eight English counties to Daniel Höchstetter and the Rev. Thomas Thurland. At the end of the year, they founded the Society of the Mines Royal, whose stockholders included Sir William Cecil (Lord Burghley), the Earl of Leicester and other English investors. They hired over 100 German and Austrian miners, who produced the first large yields of copper in the realm, at Keswick in the Lake District, in 1567.8

George Nedham, the clerk of the Society of Mines Royal and one of its shareholders, was keen to secure the lease of the Keswick copper works for himself after Höchstetter died in 1581. Nedham suspected that the mines were not operating as efficiently (and profitably) as they might and, having heard of Joachim Gans’s revolutionary techniques, he consulted Sir Francis Walsingham, the Society’s governor, with a view to appointing Gans as their new managing director. Nedham was presumably unaware that Gans was a Jew. However, as Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State and chief spymaster, Walsingham ran the intelligence operations against Spain, which also uncovered enemy agents at work in England. Dr. Hector Nuñez and one or two other Marrano (crypto-Jewish) merchants in London, posing as refugee Protestants, supplied him with vital intelligence. If Walsingham knew who they (and Gans) really were,he may not have cared a hoot.9

One obvious question is how George Nedham first contacted Joachim Gans and how Gans reacted to his proposal. Nedham spoke fluent German and it seems likely that he preferred meeting Gans in person, at Joachimsthal, to conducting long-distance negotiations with the Bohemian technologist. On the one hand, Gans may well have thought twice about accepting a post (however lucrative) in England, the first European kingdom from which Jews had been expelled nearly three hundred years earlier in 1290. On the other hand, exiled Sephardim arriving in Prague after 1500 would have brought news of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors, which may have been one inducement for Gans to accept Nedham’s offer — in the hope of striking a blow against their common enemy.

Once he arrived in England, Gans took up a managerial post at Keswick, studying the mines, urging various improvements and then increasing their output. We have a detailed account of his work there in the enthusiastic reports that Nedham submitted to Sir Francis Walsingham, which have been preserved in official documents of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.10They do not tell us if Gans spent any time in London at this stage, although he had a home there several years later. Nor is there evidence of any contact between him and the crypto-Jewish merchants in England; keeping his distance from them was just as well in view of later events.11

At Keswick, the headquarters of the Society of Mines Royal, Gans determined that the current mining operations were hopelessly outdated and inefficient. After making a thorough chemical analysis of the ores and their composition, he introduced a new, far quicker and cheaper method of smelting them to separate the copper from arsenic, iron, antimony and other “hurtfull humors”. This technique involved reducing the ore to powder and ‘roasting’ (i.e., heating) it four times only, instead of sixteen times (as was then the practice), before channeling water through the powder. Not only did his method purify the copper at an unprecedented speed – in four days rather than four months – and use peat instead of wood, a more expensive fuel; it also furnished the Society with two commercial by-products – vitriol (sulphuric acid) and copper sulphate (copperas or “coppris”) which was used to dye textiles.12 As a Jewish chemist, Gans would have known that the ink used by a sofer stam (traditional scribe) had copper sulphate (kupervasser in Yiddish) as one of its ingredients.

The success and profitability of these new techniques prompted Nedham to take Gans down to “the great work” at Neath, near Swansea in South Wales, where he may have helped to build the Mines Royal smelter in 1583 or 1584. An improved version of his method was, in any case, put to work there and also in Cornwall, where the old mines were reopened.

Nedham, Walsingham and their associates were delighted with “Master Jochim Gaunse”, because they understood the military importance of larger and cheaper copper supplies. English foundries chiefly manufactured cannon from cast iron, which was easy to produce but unmalleable and easily cracked at that time. Heavier and bulkier than bronze guns firing the same weight of shot, those made from iron were also prone to internal corrosion and apt to explode. However, a bronze alloy of copper and tin or zinc, known as gunmetal, was tougher than cast iron. Bronze cannon installed on an English man-o’-war proved safer in use and more accurate when firing on enemy ships, and the Spanish galleons were mostly armed with inferior guns.13

King Philip II of Spain, a zealous Catholic, had many scores to settle with England. After the death of his wife, Mary I (“Bloody” Mary), it reverted to Protestantism under her half-sister, Elizabeth, whom the Pope had excommunicated in 1570. English privateers, such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, constantly raided Spain’s American colonies and plundered Philip’s treasure ships. While officially regretting these depredations, Queen Elizabeth took her share of the loot and even rewarded some buccaneers with knighthoods. Worse still, England supported Spain’s enemies on the Continent — the rebellious Dutch Protestants and the French Huguenots led by Henry of Navarre. The situation had become intolerable and Philip was determined to teach the English a stern lesson.14

Anglo-Jewish historians lost sight of Joachim Gans between 1585 and 1589 as there was no reference to him in British Government documents for that period. Fortunately, that gap has been filled by two British-trained scholars: David Beers Quinn,15 a professor at Liverpool University hailed as “the pre-eminent authority on the history of early European exploration of North America”; and Ivor Noël Hume,16 the chief archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.

The ‘Virginia’ Expedition (1585-1586)

Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan soldier, sailor and courtier, now enters the picture. In 1584, a scouting expedition he had sent across the Atlantic reported that some of the Native Americans encountered there wore copper ornaments as badges of rank. This aroused hopes of finding gold and silver as well as copper in North America. Hearing that Raleigh was keen to dispatch a new and larger expedition, Queen Elizabeth granted her favorite a royal patent to explore the territory north of Spanish-controlled Florida and found an English colony there. However, to become governor of the colony, which he named Virginia in honor of the queen, Raleigh had to establish a permanent settlement in America before his patent expired in 1590. Mining and smelting operations would make this settlement economically viable and ensure its permanence.17

Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552-1618

Apart from Elizabeth, those who supported this venture included Sir William Cecil (Lord Burghley), the queen’s High Treasurer, and Sir Francis Walsingham, her Principal Secretary of State. Elizabeth expected to receive “a fifth part of the profits of gold and silver ore”, as laid down in the patent that Raleigh had been granted. Walsingham realized that only Joachim Gans and his German mining experts could determine whether commercially important ores were present in the area, and he may well have urged Raleigh to include these men (and Thomas Harriot, an English naturalist) in the team recruited for his expedition.18

Numbering over 100, the prospective settlers and those accompanying them set sail for North America in the early summer of 1585. Raleigh, who had meant to be their leader, was detained in England by the queen and it was his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, who assumed command of the Tyger and a few smaller ships. According to their instructions, Harriot would keep a record of the territory’s animal, vegetable and mineral resources while Gans (known to his companions as “Doughal Gannes”) would assay the ores from which English investors hoped to make their fortune.19

On 29 June 1585, three days after reaching the islands off Cape Hatteras,20 the Tyger ran aground when her pilot tried to steer the vessel through an inlet into Pamlico Sound. In order to free Grenville’s flagship, the crew were compelled to jettison many of their provisions along with some of the heavy equipment (including the furnace) that Gans had stowed on board. It took nearly a month for Grenville to discover a safe passage through the Outer Banks into the Sound and then moor his ships at the north end of Roanoke Island, where a fort was built to accommodate the settlers. Now called the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site at Manteo, North Carolina, it was the first English settlement in the New World, established 35 years before the Pilgrim Fathers disembarked from the Mayflower in Massachusetts. Joachim Gans thus became the first Jew to reach and explore the coastal region of North America.

Roanoke Island – map showing location of the fort

Gans’ initial task was creating a new furnace to replace the steel assay oven thrown overboard before the Tyger landed. While excavating the Roanoke site in 1990-1995, a team of archaeologists led by I N. Hume discovered that he had used locally fired bricks to build this oven, which was capable of reaching a temperature of nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit to melt copper.21 Gans then left the fort with expeditions headed by Ralph Lane, the interim governor, travelling along the shores of North Carolina and Virginia in a vain search for precious metal. A 130-mile journey by boat in the winter of 1585-6 took them as far north as Chesapeake Bay, but proved equally disappointing.

Gans was ready to make friends with the Roanoke, Croatan and other local tribes, but Governor Lane’s treatment of these ‘savages’ was comparable to that of the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico and Peru. As the explorers rowed west, battling powerful currents on the Roanoke River, their supplies ran out and the Native Americans on whom they relied for their survival fired arrows at them instead of providing food. While they had managed to find copper ore and to note how the ‘Indians’ smelted it, Lane’s men were practically starving when they returned to the fort.

They now faced an attack by hostile tribes and the supply ship promised by the Society of Mines Royal had failed to arrive. Luckily Sir Francis Drake, aboard his flagship, the Golden Hind, stopped at Roanoke Island after raiding the Spaniards in Florida. He offered to take the weary and apprehensive settlers back to England, and they left on 17 June 1586, having spent almost a year in the New World. Two weeks later, the long-delayed supply ship arrived to find the place deserted; the fifteen-man garrison left to defend it was never seen again. Raleigh’s third attempt to establish an English settlement on Roanoke Island (in 1587) resulted in the ill-fated “Lost Colony”, all of whose members disappeared without a trace.

After their return to London, Thomas Harriot published A Briefe and True Report of the New Land of Virginia (1588) while Gans delivered samples of metal-bearing ores to the queen and reported that the land had great economic value. The Roanoke Island site contains abundant evidence of his technological work there and has been called the Birthplace of American Science’.22 Instead of losing heart, the English stuck to their plans and the next major expedition founded a permanent settlement, at Jamestown in 1607. Had Gans and Harriot presented a negative report of ‘Virginia’, there might have been no Jamestown and no English presence south of New England, thereby allowing Spanish territory to extend all the way north from Florida to Pennsylvania.23

Prelude to the Armada (1586-1588)

Once back in England, Joachim Gans resumed work for the Society of Mines Royal. He would have visited Keswick and Neath, suggesting further improvements, and he now took up residence in the fashionable Blackfriars district of London. Gans presumably felt safe there and, although we have no portrait to judge by, it seems unlikely that anything in his dress or appearance distinguished him from non-Jews of the time. Yet how could he lead a Jewish life where there were no synagogues, no kosher provisions, no luachto keep track of the festivals and no way of observing Shabbat?

As “a foreigner among the English and a Jew among the Christians” (to quote Grassl’s phrase), Joachim Gans must have found it especially hard to maintain his religious beliefs and practices in the Roanoke settlement. He might have abstained from forbidden food on health grounds, but what other subterfuges existed? According to Professor Quinn, “there is little doubt that throughout his stay [Governor] Lane would hold regular services in the colony on Sundays, but, without a clergyman, these would consist only of the reading of extracts from the prayer book and the Bible, together with the singing of Psalms”.24 Could Gans refuse to participate and thus risk being ostracized by the Christians on whom his life depended more than 3000 miles from home; or should he betray his religion by paying lip service to the Anglican faith? Gans may well have felt that discretion was the better part of valor, silently bowing his head like everyone else – while mentally reciting the Shema. His situation was more favorable in London, however, for he could do as he liked in the privacy of his home.

Meanwhile, the conflict between England and Spain had reached boiling point. In 1587, Sir Francis Drake led a naval force that destroyed a Spanish fleet in the port of Cádiz, thus delaying a threatened invasion of England that had received the blessing of Pope Sixtus V. Drake called his victory “singeing the King of Spain’s beard”. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots that same year, for her involvement in a Jesuit plot to murder Queen Elizabeth and replace her on the English throne, gave Philip II the pretext he needed to launch his “Enterprise of England”, the Spanish Armada.

Dr. Hector Nuñez, the Marrano merchant and physician referred to earlier, enjoyed the confidence of Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham. Nuñez is said to have left his dinner table to bring Walsingham the first report of the Armada’s arrival in Lisbon.25 Spain’s fleet of 130 ships, with 8000 mariners and 18 000 troops on board, set sail from Lisbon on 28 May 1588. The plan was for them to navigate the English Channel to a rendezvous off the coast of Flanders; there the Duke of Parma’s army of 30 000 men would join the invasion on barges and the fleet would then escort them to a landing-place on the Thames near London.

British historiographers have tended to misrepresent Philip II’s aims and to exaggerate the “decisive victory” of England’s sea dogs in their confrontation with the Spanish Armada.26 Philip meant to punish England with a temporary invasion, but he realized well enough that restoring its people and throne to Catholicism was virtually impossible. Nor was the defeat of the Armada anything more than one battle in a long and grueling land and naval war between England and Spain (1585-1604). Drake’s fire-ships only had a minor impact on the Spanish fleet and the sea battle of Gravelines (8 August 1588) was not a “titanic naval clash” but a short, inconclusive engagement. Even so, the Armada failed to achieve its goal. The English devised new tactics, used lighter, more maneuverable ships and had better, fast-loading guns at their disposal, whereas Spain’s heavy galleons relied on single-firing cannon and were hard to navigate in the English Channel. Although the planned invasion did not take place and a ferocious storm hit the Armada as it sailed around the British Isles, destroying less seaworthy vessels, most of the Atlantic class galleons returned safely to harbor in Spain and Portugal.27

This was no great English naval victory, but it boosted the nation’s morale and convinced Elizabeth’s Protestant subjects that they enjoyed Divine favor when waging war against the Church of Rome and its Spanish agents. Commemorative medals were struck bearing the inscription: Flavit Jehovah et Dissipati Sunt (“The Lord blew, and they were scattered”). This Latin paraphrase of Exodus 15:10 had the YHVH tetragrammaton written in Hebrew,28 an unintended acknowledgment of the part Joachim Gans played in defeating Philip II’s Armada.

Medal struck to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada

At the age of 40, Gans had already led an eventful life in Bohemia, England and North America. His most dangerous adventure was about to begin.

A Perilous Disclosure

After an interval of several years, Gans is mentioned once again in official English documents.29 Apart from German, Czech and Yiddish, he now spoke English fluently and had made the acquaintance of Protestant gentlemen and clerics wishing to master classical Hebrew so as to read the “Old Testament” in its original language. This was a risky business in an era of theological controversy.

From time to time, on his journey from London to the Mines Royal operations in South Wales, Gans stayed overnight at the inn of Richard Mayes in Bristol, awaiting the arrival of a coastal vessel that would take him down the Bristol Channel to Neath. It so happened that he and an assistant named Jeremy Pierce had a discussion there about “the Old and New Testaments” on Friday, 12 September 1589. A chance remark by Gans led Pierce to suspect that his boss was a heretic. Later in the day, Richard Curteys, an Anglican divine whom Gans knew well, came to see him at the inn. Before these two met, however, Pierce secretly warned the clergyman that Gans was an ‘infidel’ because he had denied the divinity of Jesus. When Gans entered the room, Curteys decided to put him to the test, first doing so in Hebrew. To make quite sure that all the bystanders would hear the foreigner’s ‘odious’ reply, he switched to English: “What! Do you deny Jesus Christ to be the son of God?” Gans then fell into the trap, boldly maintaining his opinion that “there was but one God, who had neither wife nor child… What need has Almighty God for a son? Is He not almighty?”30

We can only hazard a guess as to the reason why Gans chose to shed his disguise after so many years. Perhaps he was tired of living a double life and believed that his services to the crown would stand him in good stead. Losing no time, Curteys went straight to the local authorities, gave sworn evidence and had Gans arrested. While under interrogation on 15 September, he declared himself to be a circumcised Jew, born in the city of Prague, also affirming that he had received a Talmudic education, had never undergone baptism and did not believe a single article of the Christian faith.31

Bristol’s mayor and aldermen were perplexed. As a self-confessed Jew, Gans could be charged with defaming the Christian religion but not with heresy. They decided that the case was not theirs to handle and on 17 September referred it, with all the incriminating evidence, to the Privy Council in London. However, several members of the Privy Council, headed by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Principal Secretary of State, and Lord Burghley, the High Treasurer, had a vested interest in the Society of Mines Royal and knew how much of its success was owed to Joachim Gans.

These powerful men were well aware that Jews did not seek to convert Gentiles to their faith and posed no threat to the established Church. The grave offence that Gans had committed was not proclaiming his Jewish faith but openly denying the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. Such a challenge could not be tolerated, and both Catholics and Anabaptists had been put to death for lesser offences. Nor could this distressing affair be kept under wraps, as Walsingham and Burghley might have preferred. John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, was also a member of the Privy Council and the Ecclesiastical Commission that he headed was authorized to entrap suspects by any means, including torture. Burghley had criticized its operations in a letter to Whitgift (1583), stating that “this kind of proceeding too much favors the Romish Inquisition”. If, as seems likely, Joachim Gans had been imprisoned to await trial, he would have come to the notice of the Anglican inquisitors and placed himself in a very dangerous situation.

Both George Nedham and Sir Francis Walsingham must have been particularly disturbed, because they were initially responsible for bringing Gans to England. In the event, however, it was apparently Gans who devised the means of his own salvation. This emerges from a document preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, which is a manuscript copy of the one Gans originally addressed to Walsingham.32 It bears no date, but must have been sent well before the Secretary of State’s death on 6 April 1590. The document chiefly consists of a 41-page manual supplying details of a new method for the production of saltpetre, an essential component of gunpowder. Gans ascribed the method to Lazarus Ercker, head of the Imperial Mines in Bohemia, and stated that he was providing an English translation of Ercker’s work in “High Dutch” (Hochdeutsch, i.e., German). This was more than just a translation, however, because it clarified many points in the original treatise. Gans made a free offer of the work, which would enable the English to manufacture their own saltpetre at low cost. He knew how badly it was needed, even after the Armada’s recent defeat, while England and Spain were still at war. His covering letter merely asked for Walsingham’s protection, “hoping thereby to be defended from all adversaries in this my good meaning”.

Knowing how useful Gans had been (and might still be), Walsingham must have taken the hint because an enquiry was made by the Privy Council, on 1 October 1589, as to the amount of gunpowder remaining in Her Majesty’s storehouses, how much it cost and who supplied it. Furthermore, there is no record of Gans having been brought to trial or executed. All trace of him simply disappeared. Cecil Roth’s conjecture that he was discreetly freed and deported33 is a fair guess. So what became of the great metallurgist? Roth tried to identify “Gaunse” with Zalman ben Seligmann Gans, who died in 1619 and was buried in the old Jewish cemetery in Prague,34 but there is no reason why he should have changed his Hebrew name and no evidence to suggest that the two men were one and the same.

Gans’ later years were cloaked in mystery until 1985, when Gary C. Grassl received a letter from Paul Frank, a member of the New York Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews. Frank stated that he was a maternal descendant of Joachim Gantz, a “Brunswick Jew” who bought a fine house in Česka Lípa (Böhmisch-Leipa) in 1596. Now if Joachim Gans was forced to leave England in 1589 or 1590, that would have given him enough time to settle in the Duchy of Brunswick and return to his native Bohemia a few years later. Česka Lípa is a small Bohemian town located about 70 km north of Prague and some 110 km north-east of Jachymov (Joachimsthal) in the Ore Mountains, where Joachim Gans first embarked on his career. According to the State Jewish Museum in Prague, Jews bearing the surname Gans who lived in Česka Lípa and Prague belonged to the same family. The town’s synagogue was burnt down on Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938) and many tombstones in the old Jewish cemetery, dating from 1574, were then used for building purposes.35 If, in fact, the metallurgist was buried there, his matzevah was probably destroyed by Sudeten Nazis.36

Tombstone of a modern Joachim Ganz (1813-1903), Bohemia

Addendum:

Joachim Gans and Francis Bacon’s New AtlantisIt has been asserted that Joachim Gans was the model for the “heroic Jewish scientist” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis.37 Having decided to investigate the basis for that claim, I had almost completed this final section of my article when a little-known but masterly treatment of the subject, by Professor Lewis Samuel Feuer, came to my attention.38 As indicated below, Feuer’s conclusions serve to validate those I had reached before reading his paper.

Francis Bacon (15611626), who first made his name as a jurist and parliamentarian, rose to eminence during the reign of King James I, becoming Attorney General (1613) and Lord Chancellor (1618). Three years later, as Viscount St. Alban, he fell into debt and his career ended in disgrace when political enemies brought about his downfall on a charge of corruption for which he was declared unworthy of holding any future office. Thereafter, Bacon devoted himself entirely to the philosophical and scientific work that led to his being called the “Father of Experimental Science”.

Sir Francis Bacon

Written around 1623 and published a year after his death, Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) is an incomplete work of fiction variously described as “an allegorical romance” or “utopian science-fiction novel”.It tells how the crew of a ship lose their way in the Pacific and land on the island of Bensalem (Hebrew: Ben Shalom, “son of peace”), where they discover the inhabitants to be of mixed decent, kindly and knowledgeable folk, pious yet tolerant, and of high moral character. The ideal commonwealth of Bensalem reflects the author’s own ideas and aspirations — notably Salomon’s House or “the College of Six Days’ Work”, a research facility where teams of investigators, intent on cultivating the natural sciences, collect data, conduct experiments and apply the knowledge they gain to produce “things of use and practice for man’s life”. The story told here is merely a shell containing the real substance, the inductive or ‘Baconian’ method of scientific enquiry, which had a revolutionary impact, inspiring the creation of Britain’s Royal Society under Charles II in 1660. It is also thought to have served as “an early blueprint” for modern scientific research institutes.39

Prominent among the inhabitants of New Atlantis is the merchant Joabin. “He was a Jew and circumcised: for they have some few stirps of Jews yet remaining among them… of a far differing disposition from the Jews in other parts”. What distinguishes them from other Jews? — The fact that they do not have “a secret inbred rancour” against Christians and even display a high regard for the Christian messiah. Jerry Weinberger, a political science professor at Michigan State University, observes that Joabin is credited with being wise, learned and skilled in matters of government. However, in view of deep-seated contemporary prejudice, Bacon calls Joabin ‘wise’ and “the good Jew” to emphasize that he is particularly benign.40 The character of Joabin has aroused considerable attention, since Bacon’s vision of a utopian America in the New Atlantis, where there would be freedom of religion and Jews might perhaps have an equal status with the dominant Christian population, was ahead of its time.41 Furthermore, this philo-semitic work “stands out as an exception to the dreary anti-Jewish sentiments that pervaded the great Elizabethan writers such as Marlowe and Shakespeare”.42

Endeavoring to find someone who could have provided Bacon with “the prototype of the Jew Joabin of Bensalem”, Lewis Feuer wonders whether there was a Jew in England “whom Francis Bacon might have known, met, or heard of” and who “shared [his] enthusiasm for technological and scientific revolution”. He suggests one candidate after another, the first being Dr. Roderigo Lopez, who fell victim to political intrigue. “In our own time”, Feuer notes, “a so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in 1953 alleged that a small group mainly composed of Jewish physicians had conspired to murder several Soviet leaders; a wave of fear, quasi-hysteria and suspicion spread among the Russian people”. An anti-Jewish nightmare atmosphere prevailed, but a few weeks after Stalin’s death “the Soviet régime acknowledged that the case had been concocted by its secret police.” Similarly, in 1594, London’s populace was incited to demand the execution of Lopez. “Even Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was altered to associate its somber physician with ‘Doctor Lupus’…”43

As Queen’s Counsel Extraordinary, Francis Bacon was present at the trial of Roderigo Lopez and wrote a memorandum hostile to the accused that was probably read by Queen Elizabeth and her current favorite, the Earl of Essex.44 Thinking back in his dismal later years, Bacon may well have regretted authoring that document, which blackened the Marrano physician’s character. Allocating Jews a role in the cultural and scientific life of his New Atlantis was therefore, perhaps, Bacon’s attempt to make some amends for what he had thought and written in the past. Nevertheless, the model he sought was not Roderigo Lopez, who “had no special involvement in the scientific movement… or in the birth of experimental investigations”.45

An even less likely model was Don Yitzhak Abrabanel (1437-1508), the eminent Jewish philosopher, Bible commentator and statesman, who had served loyally as treasurer at the Portuguese and Spanish royal courts.46 “Neither his services to the government nor his wealth availed him, however, when the Jews were banished from Spain”. A homeless exile, he finally settled in Venice and his fortitude, despite the ingratitude he has experienced, may have strengthened Bacon’s feeling of kinship with the victims of religious persecution. Even so, Abrabanel’s outspoken criticism of monarchy as a political institution and his admiration for the Italian republics would not have won Bacon’s approval.47

Who, then, could have inspired the figure of Joabin in the New Atlantis? My reason for proposing Joachim Gans was based on a number of facts and logical conclusions: (1) Lord Burghley was Francis Bacon’s uncle; (2) Burghley was in a position to tell his nephew all he needed to know about Gans, the Society of Mines Royal, the “Virginia” expedition and the Privy Council investigations; (3) In 1609-10, Bacon himself played a leading role in the establishment of England’s North American colonies. Lewis Feuer, settling on ‘Gaunse’ as Joabin’s prototype, notes that “the one industry in which Bacon took a personal interest was mining, in particular the mining of copper”.48It had both national and industrial importance, since copper was needed for the making of English cannon and for the wiring in wool cards. Burghley was “the resolute statesman” who turned copper mining into an Elizabethan monopoly, thus heralding the era of capitalist development in England.49

Pointing out that Gans was a rare individual, “brilliant, imaginative, daring, outspoken, and with a creative chemist’s intuition”, Feuer surveys his career in England and his role as “Minerall man” in the short-lived Roanoke plantation.50 Later, at a critical point in the nation’s history, this foreign Jew came to the rescue of a great industry. “When the English gunners sailed in their galleons and improvised warships in 1588, their freshly cast cannon were of brass, not of iron; one ventures to think that as they embattled to disperse that sinister line of canvas — Spain’s Armada — their aim was all the truer for the metallurgical processes proposed by the Bohemian Jew, Joachim Gaunse”.51

An account of “the last tragic episode of his career”, the theological dispute in Bristol and his dispatch to the Privy Council in London, then follows.52

Could Bacon have met and known Gans during the late 1580s? As a Reader in Law at Gray’s Inn, as Lord Burghley’s nephew and as a friend of Walsingham, Bacon would almost certainly have heard of the Jewish technological genius and his accomplishments. Feuer thinks it “not unlikely that Bacon met and talked with him”, but too close an association with the “rationalistic Jewish monotheist” would have been risky and imprudent in an era of growing Puritan fanaticism. There were also limits to the role he could confer on the Jews in the scientific community of Bensalem. “For all his sympathetic portrayal of Joabin, it was clear that Bacon would afford no suggestion that the Jews in the New Atlantis had more than an advisory, pioneer or stimulating role”.53

Analyzing Joabin’s lengthy commendation of a Bensalem institution known as the Feast of the Family, Jerry Weinberger asserted that “Joabin [is named] after the vicious Joab who, among other perfidies, helped King David murder Uriah the Hittite… Are we to conclude that Bensalem, with its science and technology, has turned Joab into an angel and solved the problem of unruly human desire?”54 Weinberger has surely missed the point. Bacon could readily quote the Bible and the idea that he named his “good Jew” after such a dubious character is utterly preposterous. He has neither detected the close phonic resemblance between Joabinand Joachim nor (it seems) heard about Fort Raleigh and the archaeological discoveries on Roanoke Island.55 The name Bacon gave to his interlocutor was therefore a half-hidden allusion to the Jewish technologist Joachim Gans.

Finally, the various theories regarding Gans’s disappearance must be considered. When Lewis Feuer published his article, the intriguing evidence mentioned earlier (on page 12) was not yet available. “Some believe the Privy Council evaded the difficult legal issues and banished him, and that Gaunse may have returned to Prague”, Feuer relates. “Others hope that he was protected by his previous employers, whose revenues his researches had enhanced — the shareholders of the Mines Royal Company, especially the two Privy Councillors who knew him personally, Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham”. Did they allow him to die broken-hearted and forgotten in prison; or did they arrange for him to live quietly on a pension in Blackfriars, conducting experiments and avoiding theological controversy? Gans would then have been a lonely man, separated from his fellow Ashkenazim in Central Europe and shunned by the suspicious Marranos whose culture was very different from his own.56

I tend to the view that he managed to leave England and find his way home to Bohemia. At any rate, from what we know, Gans was the only Jew in Elizabethan England whose scientific interests and social aims largely coincided with those of Francis Bacon. “They shared the same concern for ‘plantations’, for colonial exploration. Both were concerned with the development of a new scientific technology”. Only Joachim Hayyim Gans could have sat for the portrait of Joabin, the Jew of the New Atlantis.57

 

Gabriel Sivan is a veteran contributor and long serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs. He is associated with the World Jewish Bible Centre in Jerusalem. This article is an amplified version of a lecture originally delivered in Jerusalem to the Israel branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England in January 2013 and, in July that year, in shortened form, to the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel.

 

NOTES

  1. See, for example, Jacob R. Marcus in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972; hereafter EJ), 15:1586.
  2. The Jewish Emigrant from Britain 1700-2000, ed. Gabriel A. Sivan (Jerusalem: Israel branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 2013); reviewed in Jewish Affairs(Chanukah 2013), pp. 47-48.
  3. In England he spelt his name “Gaunse” or “Gaunz”. See Israel Abrahams, “Joachim Gaunse: A Mining Incident in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth”, Jewish Historical Society of England Transactions, vol. 4 (London, 1903), pp. 83-101; idem, in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: second ed., 1925), vol. 5, p. 576; and Lucien Wolf, “Jews in Elizabethan England,” JHSE Transactions, vol. 11 (London: 1928), pp. 2, 22, 34. Years later, Cecil Roth provided similarly incomplete details in A History of the Jews in England(Oxford: Clarendon Press, second ed., 1949), pp. 142-3, and EJ 7:337 (s.v. “Gaunse”). See also EJ 3:805 and 11:1438.
  4. To shed light on the missing years (1585-89) of Joachim Gans’s career, I have utilized material published by Gary C. Grassl, together with authoritative works by David B. Quinn, Ivor N. Hume and other writers, which indicate the vital role Gans played in this expedition.
  5. EJ 7:310-311; André Neher, David Gans (1541-1613): disciple du Maharal de Prague, assistant de Tycho Brahe et de Jean Kepler (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1974).
  6. Quotation from Gary Carl Grassl, “Joachim Gans of Prague: The First Jew in English America”, in American Jewish History, vol. 86, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 195-217.
  7. According to Israel Abrahams (“A Mining Incident”, p. 84), these experts were headed by Joachim Höchstetter of Augsburg, whom Henry VIII commissioned in 1528 to develop the mineral resources of his kingdom. Joachim’s descendants, Daniel and Daniel Jr, retained his business interests.
  8. See Maxwell Bruce Donald, Elizabethan Copper: The History of the Company of Mines Royal, 1568-1605 (London: Pergamon Press, 1955); David Bridge, “The German Miners at Keswick and the Question of Bismuth”, Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, vol. 12, no. 3 (Summer 1994); Ian Tyler, Goldscope and the Mines of Derwent Fells(Carlisle: Blue Rock Publications, 2005).
  9. See note 25, infra.
  10. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1581-90 (London, 1865), vol. 152, item 88, March 1582; reproduced by Israel Abrahams in “A Mining Incident”, Appendices A-B, pp. 93-99.
  11. An antisemitic storm was aroused in 1594 by the show trial and execution of Dr. Roderigo Lopez, the royal physician, who had been accused of conspiring to poison Queen Elizabeth. For the background, see Lucien Wolf, “Jews in Elizabethan England”, p. 31; Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: JPSA, 1932), p. 257; A History of the Jews in England, pp. 139-144; EJ 11:489-90; and David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485-1850(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 49, 108. London’s Marrano community, which had no legal status, was expelled in 1609: see EJ 6:752.
  12. Maxwell B. Donald, Elizabethan Copper, pp. 76, 209, 214-5, 299; David Bridge, “The German Miners at Keswick”, p110.
  13. Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Cannon”; Chuck Meide, The Development and Design of Bronze Ordnance, Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries (Williamsburg, VA: The College of William & Mary, November 2002), especially p. 11.
  14. See below, “Prelude to the Armada”.
  15. Quinn edited The Roanoke Voyages 1584-1590. Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America under the Patent Granted to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, 2 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1955); and published, inter alia, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
  16. Hume’s works include The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
  17. The following account is partly based on details published byGary C. Grassl, who has written extensively about Joachim Gans. Two key articles published by him are “Joachim Gans of Prague: The First Jew in English America” (see note 6, supra); and ‘Joachim Gans of Prague: America’s First Jewish Visitor’, Review of the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, vol. 1 (1986-87), pp53-90.
  18. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages, vol. 1, p. 123 (note 3); Set Fair for Roanoke, p92.
  19. Hume, The Virginia Adventure, p77.
  20. All of the places mentioned here are given their modern geographical names.
  21. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, p405. Over 100 remains of Joachim Gans’s metallurgical work unearthed there include fragments of crucibles, assayers’ retorts and chemical glassware, rusted nails, quantities of charcoal and lumps of bog iron and copper oxide, together with Native American pottery. See Hume, The Virginia Adventure, pp73-81, 84.
  22. Hume, ‘Roanoke Island: America’s First Science Center’, Colonial Williamsburg, vol. 16, no. 3 (Spring 1994); Gary C. Grassl, The Search for the First English Settlement in America: America’s First Science Center, foreword by Ivor Noël Hume (Washington DC: 2012), especially pp. 221-243.
  23. It was only after the Treaty of London (1604), which brought the conflict with Spain to an end, that the English were free to establish permanent colonies in North America: see also below.
  24. Set Fair for Roanoke, p96.
  25. Wolf, “Jews in Elizabethan England”, pp. 23-24; Roth, A History of the Jews in England, p. 140; EJ 6:752, 12:1274.
  26. See, for example, Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (London: Penguin Books, 1999; second ed., 2002). A truer picture emerges from Wes Ulm’s detailed survey entitled “Top 10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada, history’s most confused and misunderstood battle”: http://wesulm.bravehost.com/history/sp_armada.htm, ©2004.
  27. Wes Ulm, op. cit. In point of fact, Spain’s leaders never referred to “the Invincible Armada”. That term was a later invention by historians of the patriotic British school.
  28. See the accompanying illustration. This early use of the “original sacred tongue” in English seals and emblems may be linked with the Regius chairs of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge founded by Henry VIII in 1540. The New England Puritans were zealous advocates of Hebrew language study, and “generations of students at Harvard and Yale were required to learn Hebrew as the prime key to the Old Testament”. The tetragrammaton and another Hebrew phrase adorn the seal of Columbia University, a tradition maintained by other colleges of the American Colonial period. See Gabriel Sivan, The Bible and Civilization (Jerusalem/New York, 1973), pp. 236-7.
  29. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1581-90(London, 1865), vol. 226, item 40, September 1589; reproduced by Israel Abrahams, “A Mining Incident”, Appendices C-F, pp. 99-101.
  30. As transcribed by Israel Abrahams (“A Mining Incident”, p. 100), the deposition reads: “I the said Richard Curteys spake in the Hebrue tounge to this effect that Jesus of Nazareth the kinge of the Jews whome the Jewes crucyfied was and is the sonne of God at which tyme he answered me in the Hebrue tounge he is not the sonne of God whose replie beinge so odious I spake in the englishe tonge to the ende that others beinge there present might heare it and witnes his speeche, what do you denie Jesus Christ to be the sonne of God, at which tyme he awnswered what needeth the almightie God to have a sonne, is he not almyghtie”.
  31. According to his testimony before Mayor Robert Kitchen and Bristol’s aldermen on 15 September 1589 (Abrahams, ibid.), “Jeochim Gaunz of the Cytie of London… affirmeth and saythe that he the said Jeochim ys a Jewe borne in the Cytie of Prage in Bohemia, and that he was Circumcised and hath bin alwayes instructed and broughte yppe in the Talmud of the Jewys and was never Baptized, neyther dothe he beeleeve any Article of our Christyan faithe for that he was not broughte yppe therein”.
  32. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Salisbury preserved at Hatfield House, Hert-fordshire (London, 1923), Cecil Papers 276.5.
  33. A History of the Jews in England, pp142-3.
  34. EJ 7:337. According to André Neher (op. cit., pp. 26-27; see note 5 above), Seligmann Gans was the astronomer’s grandfather.
  35. EJ 5:314-5; The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), vol. 1, p. 239.
  36. Curiously enough, the tombstone of a modern Joachim Hayyim Gans (c. 1813-1903) has survived in the Jewish cemetery of Rožmberk nad Vltavou (Rosenberg an der Moldau), a township in the far south of Bohemia close to the Austrian border. Its traditional inscription gives his Hebrew name (çééí âàðõ) and states (in German) that he “died on 28 February 1903, in his ninetieth year, deeply mourned by his children”. The fact that this Bohemian Jew was a namesake of ‘our’ Joachim Gans is intriguing: the much-traveled scientist may perhaps have had Jewish descendants.
  37. Gary C. Grassl, “Joachim Gans of Prague”: see note 6 above.
  38. 38 Lewis S. Feuer, ‘Francis Bacon and the Jews: Who was the Jew in the New Atlantis?’, Jewish Historical Studies (JHSE Transactions), vol. 29 (London, 1982-86), pp. 1-25. I am grateful to Rabbi Raymond Apple for supplying me with a copy of this article. An eminent sociologist and one-time radical, Lewis Feuer (1912-2002) became an incisive critic of left-wing movements after World War II. While writing on the history and sociology of Jews and Judaism, his studies deal mainly with the history of ideas, the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, the corrupting influence of Marxist ideology and America’s role as a bulwark against tyranny and authoritarianism in the modern world.
  39. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/bacon. The published text of New Atlantis is in the public domain and can be downloaded (http://gutenberg.org/files/2434). There is also a LibriVox sound version of the book (15 November 2011) recorded by Bill Boerst.
  40. Introduction to Francis Bacon: New Atlantis and The Great Instauration, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Wheeling, IL: Crofts Classics, 1989), pp. xxv-xxvi, xxxi.
  41. Jews would not be readmitted to England (unofficially) until 1656. Another essay of relevance, by Claire Jowitt, is “‘Books will speak plain’? Colonialism, Jewishness and politics in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” Part 7 of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. New interdisciplinary essays, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 129-155.
  42. Feuer, op. cit., p1.
  43. Ibid., p3.
  44. A True Report of the Detestable Treason, Intended by Dr Roderigo Lopez, A Physician attending upon the Queen’s Majesty. Unlike Essex, a leader of the anti-Spanish war party, Elizabeth was not convinced that Lopez was guilty and delayed signing his death warrant for nearly five months. She also allowed his widow, Sarah, to retain most of the property belonging to her late husband, the alleged planner of regicide.
  45. Feuer, op.cit., pp3-5.
  46. Without identifying him by name, in his Essays and The Advancement of Learning, Bacon evidently refers to Don Yitzhak Abrabanel when he quotes “a certain Rabbin”. He had no doubt read Latin translations of Abrabanel’s Bible commentaries.
  47. Feuer, p6.
  48. Ibid., p7.
  49. Ibid., p9.
  50. Ibid., pp9-12.
  51. Ibid., pp10 and 23 (note 56).
  52. Ibid., pp12-14.
  53. Ibid., pp15-16, 19-20.
  54. Weinberger, ‘On the miracles in Bacon’s New Atlantis’, Part 6 of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, ed. Bronwen Price, p110. Cf. Weinberger’s previous article, “Science and Rule in Bacon’s Utopia. An Introduction to the Reading of the New Atlantis”, in The American Political Science Review, vol. 10 (1976), p882
  55. Feuer (p20) likewise observes that “with only one consonantalalteration, [Joabin] is the given name of Joachim Gaunse. The chief alteration with a ‘b’ to Joabin leads to the further suggestion that he is the son of Job. (The Hebrew spelling of ‘Job’ almost coincides with that of Joab; it interchanges the order of the vowels.)” In a footnote (p 25, note 105), Feuer proceeds to refute Weinberger’s assertion that Joabin was named after Joab: “This hardly jibes with the character of the Jew of the New Atlantis, a pacific, earnest merchant with none of Joab’s traits…”
  56. Feuer, ibid., pp. 14, 15, 21.
  57. Ibid., pp. 20-21

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