2006-06
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 5/31/2006
Three page, neatly penned letter by “R. C. MOISE” dated only “December 24” (no year nor city where sent). He was unquestionably a member of the large, influential Moise family of Charleston, South Carolina (great many of whom fought with the Confederate forces during Civil War) and were instrumental in many phases of South Car. commercial and communal activities. Three pages. He opens: “We are approaching the end of a year marked by greater vicissitudes in the affairs of nations then any in which we have lived…any indeed of which we have read. Such great events have marked epochs. Another to be addressed is the consistency of my correspondence to you. [Very poor has been] your repeated failures replying to my communications. I trust the old year will blot out all your delinquencies and that the New Year will bring with it punctual offerings to the shrine of friendship. I have great respect for your clothes and for your talents, but a much greater [one] for my dignity and truly [my patience wears thin] when I find you allow my responses to be like angels visits. Your desire that memories of the past shall satisfy our hopes for the future is rather unreasonable and not meted out with that spirit of generosity which we are led to expect from one of your high inspirations. …Feel it incumbent on my dignity to inform you that if you allow my letters to lie so long on the shelf unanswered I shall cast out all remembrances of past friendship and think of our friendship as a thing that was not. But, [banter] aside, tell me good friend in sober earnest why is it that I never hear from you but through the “Occident” and through malevolent reports which tell me that you are woefully disappointed in my character and the esteem you have expressed exists no longer because forsooth I cannot see with your eyes or read with your interpretations. This latter reason I cast from me as unbecoming both your religion and your mind, for however we may desire our friends to view things as we do, we do not banish them from our esteem because they cannot think as we do. I know you value the substance not the shadow, and as I retain the former will not discard me because I lop off those discrepancies which mar the beauty of our holy religion. …My Cousin M. Moise returned much pleased with his knowledge of you personally and was pleased to find such liberal sentiments expressed by one so thoroughly versed in all the elements of our faith. THE FAULT OF AMERICAN JEWS ORIGINATES IN THEIR DEFECTIVE DOMESTIC EDUCATION. Religion with them is but an appendage, not an essential. They know they are born Jews, but they are not easily inculcated with its purity and beauty; this has been the defect in all our domestic education. This era is becoming yearly less glaring and parents are becoming more alive to the necessity of making the religion of the Jew primary and not a secondary consideration. I have noticed the deep importance you feel in the establishment of schools where from the cradle the infant Israelite will unite with all his studies a knowledge of Judaism and will have those doctrines of his faith taught by those who feel the importance of combining every knowledge with a knowledge of his God and will find no opposition to his understanding. Clearly those dogmas which seem now so abstruse to them because other views clash with them from the opinions gathered from their Christian teachers. While writing I am annoyed by the ‘feu de joie’ which ushers in the birth of Christ; how inconsistent it appears to me that the Birth of their Savior should be celebrated by the firing of cannons and guns as if it were a National victory ! Marriages and deaths go on in our circle, the latter by far the most frequent, for unlike our pristine parents our fancied wants are so numerous that poor young men are afraid to enter into a state which requires such ample measures to render it pleasant ! This will be handed to you by my eldest son who goes on for business not pleasure. He is reserved to strangers and like his mother his ‘light is hid under a bushel.’ …Should like to introduce you to [all my family] for like the Mothers of Israel they are all my breathren... I shall be pleased with a reply for I would not let Philip go without informing you however hard you have been that a son of mine was in your city…” Normal aging. Few very light, minor fading ink stains not obliterating any wording. Letter apparently written early in the Civil War years. The Moise family played important roles in the civic and Jewish communal life of Charleston. Accompanied by fine bio sketches of the family and many of its members
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