While I was researching my article on the ongoing threat posed by dissenter academies, I happened to see an unrelated news item about a Jeremiah Levi, convicted in London of “stealing Aaron’s Bells” and sentenced to America. Naturally, I had to look into this.
In this context, “Aaron’s Bells” turns out to refer to rimonim, the fancy ornaments on some Torahs. They often have bells attached. They were presumably nicknamed Aaron’s Bells as a reference to the garment of the high priest described in Exodus 28, a robe decorated in an alternating pattern of pomegranates and bells. Rimonim comes from the Hebrew for pomegranate. The robe ornaments were definitely actual bells (not sure if they were actual pomegranates) because it’s specified that when Aaron wears the robe and goes into the most holy place alone, the congregation needs to be able to hear the bells jingling so they know he’s still alive.
Rimonim are often elaborately engraved and often made of precious metals, making them valuable either as art or as raw material. It’s also, in effect, a required element of ceremonies to show the entire congregation where they’re stored and how to open the container. So they’re a pretty tempting target for thieves, aside from the sacrilege and the built-in burglar alarm. People steal my bells pretty often, as it turns out.
My first plan for this post was to do a series of profiles of different thieves, similar to my post on seven battles at Thermopylae. But it turns out that profiling a never-famous person requires so much research and guesswork that I think it’s worth making Jeremiah Levi a post unto himself. I don’t have a larger point for this one, other than my recurring theme that any road through history will pass some interesting attractions.
The Trial
Thanks to oldbaileyonline.org, I was able to read the full transcript of the trial of Jeremiah Levi.
Until it was destroyed by a bomb in World War II, there was a Great Synagogue at St. James’s Duke’s Place. We hear from several witnesses, including Benjamin Levy (no relation mentioned), and the prisoner.
Levi had already confessed, so the trial is just about getting all the facts on the record. He was a recent immigrant from Germany1, and desperately poor. He hid in the synagogue overnight. If I’m doing my calendar conversions right2, this would’ve been Erev 11th Adar II, not a holiday and a day after Shabbat services. Few people would be there and the coffers would be full. That night or early the next morning, he took what he could, climbed out a window, and hid the loot under the floorboards of his nearby home.
Upon discovering they’d been robbed, the Jews then did their own forensic analysis, which seems to have been fairly sophisticated. They found “little sparks of gold” in one of the windows, which they correctly guessed meant that the gold-trimmed veils had been dragged through it. So they got a search warrant for the three or four houses nearest to that window, and found some rope from the synagogue in Levi’s. In parallel, they went over the synagogue again and found a cane left in the “women’s gallery,” one somebody thought they remembered seeing Levi using. So they confronted Levi, found an inconsistency in his story and what witnesses said, and got him to confess. His only condition was that he wouldn’t have to confess in front of the whole congregation. The plan, he claimed, had been to hide the rimonim until a reward was offered, then pretend to find them and return them. He told his interrogators where he’d hidden them.
It’s interesting how little friction there seems to be here. The Jews do basically all of the investigation and law enforcement themselves, but are able to quickly get a search warrant before doing anything otherwise illegal. Then they turn one of their own over to the judicial system rather than exact justice themselves. There’s a slightly awkward moment early on due to the Jews translating Torah to Law in their report and testimony, which is indeed a literal English translation but which confuses the court officials. (Writing down the law! What a concept! It’ll never catch on.) Also, Benjamin Levy seems to have this weird notion that hearsay should be inadmissible in court, and has to be pressured into testifying about what the investigators told him instead of sticking to his own observations. But, at least in the way the record presents itself, it all seems pretty calm and clean. Pro forma, but thorough.
The Sentence
The transcript stops at the Guilty verdict. Sentencing is in a separate record where the details are sparser. All we get is that Jeremiah Levi was sentenced to 7 years transportation. This seems to have been the minimum possible sentence, meaning he was likely granted “the benefit of the clergy,” a deeply weird concept in legal history. Originally, this would have meant that Levi had claimed he was a member of the (Anglican) clergy, and therefore had his case transferred to Ecclesiastical court, which had generally more lenient penalties. Then it became standard practice to have the judge just check whether the prisoner was actually in the clergy, and if so apply the relevant penalty from ecclesiastical law. The judge would check this by testing whether the prisoner could read. The assumption that only clergy could read became less and less true over time. Especially after the procedure was formalized to the point where they always tested it using the same Bible verse, so even illiterate people could just memorize that verse and fake it, which became very common. So they added in other checks—the first time you were convicted, they’d brand your thumb, and recidivists weren’t allowed to claim the benefit. And, according to some sources, there were a few decades where being too obviously Jewish disqualified you from claiming to be an Anglican minister. Fortunately for Levi, by 1748 the “benefit of the clergy” was just a judge deciding to show leniency—he could just declare you to be a cleric no matter what, even if your crime was robbing the Jewish clergy.
Before the Revolutionary War, transportation meant being sent to America.
Okay, but America is big.
Was the sentence actually carried out? If so, where did he end up?
Here’s where I had to do more digging and guesswork than I’m used to, or expert at, so take all of this with a giant helping of salt. Jeremiah Levi is not exactly a major figure in anybody’s history. Everything that follows could be based on name collisions, coincidences, or errors introduced while copying or scanning old records.
I can only find one reference to someone of that name in America in that time period, so I’m tentatively assuming that’s him. Someone named Huldah Loring died in 1820 in Cumberland, Maine, and her father is listed as Jeremiah Levi. No mother is given, unusually. A gravestone in Hull, Massachusetts is inscribed to Hulda3 Loring, age 70, wife of Samuel Loring, died 1820. So I’m going to run with the assumption that Huldah Loring, née Levi, was either born in New England in 1750, or more likely arrived there as an infant in 1750 and later treated that as her birth year. Jeremiah, Huldah, and Levi are Jewish names, but they were also popular Old Testament names for Christians at the time. So there are plenty of red herrings in these records.
Jeremiah Levi was in a distressed and desperate state, he says in his allocution and the witnesses confirm. At the time of the theft, he had a son who was old enough to be writing at a desk at home when it was searched. There’s no mention of a wife or mother. So, I think he was quite possibly a single father of two, whose wife had just died soon after, or while, giving birth to the second. Widowed right after the birth of his daughter and moving to a new country, Levi was in a fix and not making good decisions.
Hulda(h) Levi only shows up, with that name, once that I could find. In colonial Connecticut, people and communities supporting people in need could petition the government for reimbursement. In 1772, the selectmen4 of Guilford, Connecticut received reimbursement for the support of two people, one of whom is Huldah Levi.
In the other records on this page, the people being supported are always referred to as “transient persons,” usually sick ones. These two don’t get any explanation. I’m going to leap to the conclusion that they were young orphans. Huldah is 12 or 13, according to her death record, but probably actually a little older. That’s around the time you become an adult in colonial America, which is presumably when your town applies for reimbursement for your care.
So Jeremiah, who was already sometimes using a cane in 17485 and then imprisoned and put on a ship, had been dead for at least a few years in 1772. Guilford, Connecticut took in his orphaned daughter. She may have been the only Jew in the state—there were no synagogues, and a diary entry from 1760 says that “on inquiry it seems there are no Jews in Connecticut.” But New England took her in, all the same. She married Samuel Loring, making her probably6 related by marriage to friend of the blog Jonathan Loring Austin, another colonial New Englander. She lived a good long time, and she remembered who her father was. Nothing worked out the way Jeremiah had planned it when he stole Aaron’s Bells. But if his ultimate goal was to provide for his daughter, maybe it worked out all right in the end.
There’s a Jeremias Levi mentioned in German documents in the 1730s, but not as a suspect. In an anti-Semitic “true crime” book about a Jewish gang, he’s part of a chain of hearsay about another Jew stealing from a business. The book brings him up a fair bit in order to make the point that Jewish solidarity makes all Jews complicit in all crimes committed by Jews. If that’s him, I can guess why he left.
This is kind of a perfect storm of complicated calendar math. The month was Adar II because this was a leap year in the Hebrew calendar, in which there are two months named Adar. In the dating system used by the Old Bailey, the theft was discovered on February 29th, 1748—a leap day. Which is a bit of a coincidence—the two calendars rarely take synchronized leaps, as the Hebrew leap year is on a 19-year cycle. 19 is a prime number, so it doesn’t align with any cycles that aren’t also a multiple of 19. It’s speculated that cicadas hibernate in prime-length cycles for this reason, to avoid syncing up with predators. The Hebrew calendar has 7 leap years spread out in a 19-year cycle for a different reason: it’s tuning things very carefully to ensure that Passover always falls near the Spring equinox. The calendar the British were using in 1748 was the old-style Julian calendar, which didn’t accomplish the same goal for Easter. The Julian calendar had too many leap years, so Spring was slowly getting later and later in the year. Most of the Christian world had already switched to the Gregorian calendar, specifically to fix the spring equinox Easter thing, but Britain had stubbornly held out for centuries, as is their way. They surrendered in 1752, four years too late to save me. Also, users of the Julian calendar weren’t consistent about whether the year incremented in January or late March, so some records from the same day would be dated 1747. Fortunately, at one point in the trial they mention that February 29th was a Monday, and I think that removes all the ambiguity.
I’m treating Hulda and Huldah as interchangeable here, because that seems to be how it worked. There’s a gravestone in the same cemetery for the daughter of Samuel and Huldah Loring.
My primary reference for colonial Connecticut history is of course Gilmore Girls, so all I can tell you about a selectman is that it’s the job title of Taylor Doose, the officious leader of town meetings.
The Old Bailey proceedings the same day involved prosecuting the theft of a cane, so I suspect they were expensive enough that a poor person would only have a cane if he needed one, not for fashion.
Probably distantly. Loring is an English surname, an anglicization of the French “Lorraine” that originated in the Norman conquest. There were a lot of Lorings in New England.