Circumcision Register of Meyer Derkheim, 1774-1818

9 manuscript leaves (6 1/8 x 3 7/8 in.; 155 x 98 mm), now loose, though formerly bound. Written in brown ink on paper in Ashkenazic semi cursive Hebrew script; occasional place names, and three entries written in English. Browned and stained. Marginal chips, affecting only a few letters on one leaf. Later pencil notations; modern mid-gutter pagination.

George Alexander Kohut, known to be in his library in 1917

Goldman, p. 1165; Morton D. Paley, “Coleridge's Captain Derkheim,” in Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 40, No. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2009, pp. 82-87; Herbert Tobias, and Ezekiel G. Lichtenstein, The History of the Jews of Richmond from 1769 to 1917, pp. 32-34. Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776-1985, pp. 135, 251. 

Myer Derkheim performed his first Brit Milah (Jewish ritual circumcision) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire when he was only 26 years old. The final circumcision at which he presided as mohel took place in 1818, the year of his death. During the 44 intervening years, Derkheim traveled the length of the newly created United States and new country in which he had settled, and he officiated at the sacred rite of initiation into the Jewish faith another 75 times; each he recorded faithfully, on these pages. His peregrinations to perform the sacred task took him from Maine to South Carolina, visiting both established Jewish communities and small outposts of Jewish life in rural America.

Although Jewish tradition calls for the circumcision to be performed on the eighth day after birth, a close examination of the dates of circumcision in this register reveals that, in practice, many of the circumcisions performed by Derkheim, took place much later. The high neonatal mortality rate that prevailed in the eighteenth century meant that some circumcisions were delayed for health reasons. Derkheim’s own son Moses, whose birth and circumcision are both recorded in this register, did not undergo circumcision until he was 11 months old. The dearth of practitioners of the ancient rite and the great distances between Jewish communities meant that circumcisers rarely found their way into the hinterland and some youngsters had to wait years before the mohel came.

Jacob Rader Marcus, the doyen of American Jewish history, explicitly refenced the importance of Meyer Derkheim’s circumcision register as a testament to the fidelity to their faith, exhibited by the Jews of even the most distant American towns and villages.

In addition to his career as an itinerant mohel, Derkheim was one of the founders of the Jewish cemetery in Charleston S.C.