Rebekah Hyneman’s “The Lost Diamond“ – Towards Jews’ and Gentiles’ Mutual Exchange

Abstract In addition to presenting personal contemplations on various topics, Rebekah Hyneman’s prose and poetry has broader political and social agendas, namely bridging the gap between Jews and Gentiles. Hyneman felt that the Gentiles’ lack of knowledge of Jewish traditions leads to estrangement between Jews and non-Jews. Nineteenth-century Jewish female writers, a religious and cultural minority within a minority (women writers in patriarchal society), have been misrepresented by their contemporaries. Modern critics have failed as well to relate to their distinctive contribution as Jews, and thus are held responsible for minimizing these writers’ contribution to the nineteenth-century general effort. Rebekah Hyneman’s “The Lost Diamond“ (1862) is a case in point of a Jewish female writer who constructs multiple identities in her factual life, prose and poetry, none of which necessarily contradicts the other. Hyneman was at once a convert to Judaism and an opponent of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles, a zealous American patriot, but one of the earliest Zionists, advocating the Jewish people’s return to Jerusalem. She was a Jewish writer and poet, a “Mother in Israel,“ as I would like to call her, who concerned herself with Jewish traditions, and forced conversion to Christianity, and a writer who addressed the general public, especially female readership. Though far from being a feminist, one of Hyneman’s major efforts was dedicated to the creation of a female “sweet communion,“ a sort of spiritual union of all women, that is, both Jewish and Gentiles.