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The Troubling Biography of Abraham Pass: a Young Jewish Criminal Executed at Tyburn

Mon, December 17, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 2 Ballroom

Abstract

On Monday November 21st, 1743, Abraham Pass, not quite 18 years of age, was executed at Tyburn. He had been found guilty of stealing 250 ells of linen cloth, valued at £8.00. A Portuguese Jew originally from Bordeaux, Pass was the son of a merchant family. At 12 years of age, his parents sent him to Amsterdam to learn Hebrew and High and Low Dutch. After two years in Amsterdam, he returned to his parental home where he continued to further his education in the Hebrew and Spanish languages. But soon after, he ran away from home and, for about a year he traveled from port-city-to port-city where merchant Sephardi communities were found: Italy, France, Turkey, Gibraltar and Barbados, and finally, London, For a while, Pass allied himself with the Spanish-Portuguese congregation and served as an apprentice to two members of the congregation, but within three years he had met his tragic end. Pass’s biography was written shortly before his death by James Guthrie, the “Ordinary” chaplain of Newgate prison, whose duty was to attend to the spiritual needs of those condemned to death.

Although Pass’s biography is partly formulaic and similar to other criminal biographies by Guthrie, much of the information about Pass is either highly plausible or historically verifiable. Pass’s execution came at a problematic time, when Jews were struggling for rights in London and in the British colonies. My presentation will be a study of Pass’s biography against the backdrop of how the London Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community was reacting to the harsh reality of contemporary Jewish crime. Pass’s biography reveals the Jewish community’s attempts to distance themselves from troublesome Jews.

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