Grace Aguilar (Hackney 1816 - Frankfurt 1847) was an Anglo-Jewish scholar, author, religious reformer, educator and poet who, in her short life, became one of the most prolific women writers, and “the most prominent spokesperson for English Jews” (Galchinsky 1997, 27) in Victorian London. Several of her publications sold as many as Dickens’ and were still republished many years after her death. Her History of the Jews in England (1847) published anonymously was the first such history published by an Anglo-Jewish author. Her historical romances and domestic novels, many of them published by her mother posthumously, were translated into several languages, including Hebrew. Her essays on Judaism and the education of women granted her international recognition to the point that the Aguilar branch of the New York Public Library in East Harlem is named after her. Aguilar advocated for a new form of Anglo-Jewish practice or Liberal Judaism and was a leading force in the establishment of Jewish women’s institutions and literary communities. Her death at the age of 31 was mourned by Christians and Jews and tributes appeared in the press in London and Philadelphia. She is buried in the Frankfurt Jewish Cemetery, her tombstone reads ‘Woman of Valour’.

A Sephardic family in the East End of London

Grace Aguilar was born into a family of Sephardic Jews on June 2, 1816, in The Paragon, Hackney. Sephardic Jews had settled in Hackney in the mid-17th century after escaping the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. It was a community of successful merchants, traders and bankers with international networks. They funded the first synagogue in London, Bevis Marks, in Aldgate, which is still referred to as the ‘Spanish synagogue’ and opened the first Jewish orphanage in England. In the 18th century, Hackney, a country village on the outskirts of London, was considered a prosperous mercantile and residential community but, at the time when Grace was born the neighbourhood was more of a Sephardi ‘proletariat’ that also extended to nearby Bethnal Green and included newcomer Polish-German Ashkenazi refugees.

Grace’s father, Emanuel Aguilar (1787-1845), was a merchant from a lineage originating in the city of Córdoba, Spain (Lask Abrahams 1951, 138). Emanuel served as the ‘Parnas’ or lay leader at the Bevis Marks synagogue. He died of tuberculosis and was buried in the Sephardi Novo Cemetery in Mile End, now in the grounds of Queen Mary University of London. Grace’s mother Sarah Dias Fernandes (1787-1854) was an educated woman descendant from Portuguese sugar plantation owners in Jamaica who had links with the East End since the 1740s. Grace had two younger brothers, Emanuel (1824-1904) who became a successful musician and music teacher in London and Henry (1827-1902) who became a sailor in the West India Company and later joined the Royal Navy.

Grace was mostly home educated by her parents. Emanuel guided her choice of readings and instructed her in Jewish history and the oral traditions of the Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. The Judaeo-Spanish Romancero was in fact the source of inspiration for Grace’s historical romances, such as The Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century, written when she was in her twenties and published by her mother posthumously in 1852.

Sarah encouraged her daughter’s avid reading habits and her determination to become a writer and a scholar. She was also responsible for her religious upbringing, personifying what would be Grace’s main claim: the importance of women in transferring religious and cultural practices. For Grace, home was the private space where moral principles and Jewish culture can flourish and women, mothers, were the soul of the home. Although orthodox in theory, this idea vindicates and raises the status of women as instrumental in ensuring the continuity of the beliefs and customs in the community. It also establishes links with repertoires of exile and migration in which cultural encounters between minority groups, such as the Sephardi Jews and the Christian majority reveal ambivalence: an assimilation of common principles in the public sphere, while privately preserving their own cultural practices and the story of their migratory lives. Sarah’s influence is encapsulated in the following dedication by Grace:

“To her/ whose precepts and example/ originally inspired the sentiments contained in the following pages,/ The tender guardian of my infancy,/ the sole instructress of my youth,/ the faithful friend of riper years, /To/ My Beloved Mother,/ this volume/ is most gratefully and affectionately inscribed” (The Spirit of Judaism, 1842). 

As a child, Grace contracted an undiagnosed disease that left her with a delicate health. She developed measles at nineteen and later on a spinal ailment that paralyzed her muscles and lungs. None of this prevented her from keeping a multi-volume journal which she began at seven and from playing the piano and the harp. When her father was diagnosed with tuberculosis the family left London for the coast of Devon. The Devonshire years gave Grace the opportunity to broaden her education with a tour of English towns and historical sites. Those years also marked a busy literary activity. Aged twelve, Grace wrote Gustavus Vasa, a small drama about a Swedish king which was never published, and her first book of poems, The Magic Wreath of Hidden Flower, printed later on in 1835 in Brighton.

By 1840 the Aguilars moved back to London. They lived at 5, Triangle Rd. Hackney (now the Ann Tyler’s children centre) where Sarah opened an academy for boys, as shown by an advert in the Voice of Jacob in March, 1842:

“Mrs. and Miss Aguilar's Preparatory Establishment for Young Gentlemen, from four to ten years of age, No. 5 Triangle, Hackney, with liberal board, and instruction in Religion, the English and Hebrew Languages, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography and History." (Lask Abrahams 1951, 141).

Although she was helped by cousins Rebecca and Lydia Aguilar, Grace was practically running the school as her mother was now an invalid. In those years, Grace began to launch her writing career into the British and American literary worlds. Benjamin Disraeli, a Sephardic himself, helped her to find a publisher in England, while Isaac Leeser, editor of the American Jewish periodical The Occident in Philadelphia, agreed to publish some of her poems and her first major piece, The Spirit of Judaism (1842). The success of this and Women of Israel (1845) enabled mother and daughter to relocate to 1, Clarence Place, Clapton Square after the death of Emanuel. This would be Grace’s last home in London. She died in Frankfurt on 16 September 1847 at the age of 31 while visiting her brother and seeking medical treatment.

Grace Aguilar’s progressive traditionalist writings

Between her first novel in 1834, aged 18, and her death in 1847, Grace published twelve books, including a translation from the French of the Portuguese Jewish philosopher, Isaac Orobio de Castro’s (1620–1687) Israel Defended, which she printed for private circulation. Her poems in Anglo-Jewish periodicals such as The Voice of Jacob and The Jewish Chronicle brought her recognition among Romantic and early Victorian poets and writers, such as the writer and philanthropist Anna Maria Hall.

As a fiction writer, Aguilar produced historical romances through the mid-1840s. She also wrote descriptions of contemporary Anglo-Jewish life for Charlotte Montefiore’s Cheap Jewish Library (1841-1849), a series of tracts aimed at poor Jews in London. Aguilar’s contribution, The Perez Family, a sentimental domestic novella, documented Victorian Jews’ ambivalence toward their own modernization and demonstrated her belief in women’s ability to interpret the dictates of the Bible.

From her popular domestic novels Home Influence: a Tale of Mothers and Daughters (1847) and its sequels, A Mother's Recompense and Woman’s Friendship, published after her death, to her epistolary educational tract, The Jewish Faith (1846), Aguilar’s writings are about women and for women and share the common ideal of the domestic Jewish woman who guides her children’s moral and religious education. Because of the importance she placed on the role of women as instructors she called for reforms in the education of Jewish women and advocated their right to participate in the intellectual life of the community by giving them the same entitlement as men to learn Hebrew. In her groundbreaking piece Women of Israel (1844), a series of biographical accounts of biblical, Talmudic and modern Jewish women, she undertook to rectify women's exclusion from Jewish history and culture by focussing on women’s experience. This masterpiece represents “a major break with the androcentric Jewish past” (Galchinsky 1997, 40). It also followed in her vision of the spiritual and educational needs of Jewish women already displayed in The Spirit of Judaism (1842). These two polemical works and the later The Jewish Faith (1846) were criticised by contemporary Jewish patriarchs, including her editor Isaac Leeser. He nevertheless, realised the need for an English translation of the Hebrew Bible for women's use and produced the first such translation in the history of the English-speaking world.

Grace Aguilar spent the last three years of her life writing intensively. Her last publication, History of the Jews in England, published anonymously months before her death in Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts in 1847, was the first such history by an Anglo-Jewish author.

An inspirational force

Grace Aguilar’s work as a writer and as an educator was celebrated by contemporary Jewish women who admired the fact that it fell upon a woman to be “the public advocate of the faith of Israel” (Lask Abrahams 1951, 147). She fostered literary and philanthropic associations and contributed to other women’s projects such as Charlotte Montefiore’s Cheap Jewish Library and Abigail Lindo’s lexicographical work. She was the inspiration for Marion Hartog's Jewish Sabbath Journal (1855), the first Jewish women's periodical published in modern times and motivated American Jewish educator and philanthropist Rebecca Gratz, founder of the Jewish Sunday School movement, to using Aguilar’s writings in her Sunday Schools.

The above portrait of Grace Aguilar by Luis Celorio was displayed at an exhibition in the ‘Casa de Sefarad’ in the old Jewish quarter of the city of Córdoba, Spain, a cultural centre dedicated to the history of the Jews in Córdoba  (https://esefarad.com/mujeres-y-sefarad/; https://www.artencordoba.com/casa-sefarad-cordoba/). Once the capital of the Islamic Umayyad dynasty, and under their protection, Córdoba was one of the great centres of Sephardic Jewish life in Muslim Spain. While the portrait does not intend to be a faithful reproduction of the only known image of the writer, it captures her essence: the power of observation in her eyes, the glimpse of ill-health and the calm beauty of the exceptional thinker and the woman she was.

Sources:

Aguilar, S., 1847. “Memoir of Grace Aguilar.” Preface to Home Influence. London.

Aguilar, G., 1842. The Spirit of Judaism. Philadelphia. Edited by Isaac Leeser.

Brown, M., 1988. The Jews of Hackney before 1840. Jewish Historical Studies , 1987-1988, Vol. 30 (1987-1988), pp. 71-89. Published by: Jewish Historical Society of England. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29779839

Christiansen, S., 2020. Unearthing the oldest Jewish cemetery in the UK.  April 9, 2020 , https://romanroadlondon.com/velho-cemetery-mile-end-jewish-history/, Feb. 20, 2020, https://romanroadlondon.com/novo-cemetery-jewish-history/

Galchinsky, M., 1997. Modern Jewish Women’s dilemmas: Gace Aguilar’s Bargains. Literature and Theology. Vol 11, n. 1, March 1997.

Jewish Virtual Library. Grace Aguilar, 1816-1847. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/grace-aguilar

Lask Abrahams, B., 1951. Grace Aguilar: A Centenary Tribute. Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), 1945-1951, Vol. 16 (1945-1951), pp. 137-148.  Jewish Historical Society of England: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2977786

Author:

Matilde Gallardo is a lecturer and researcher with an interest in transnational women’s social and literary history.