The Jews in America Trilogy by Birmingham Stephen;

Author:Birmingham, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

12

LEGENDS AND LEGACIES

Each of the old families has its favorite legend, and Aunt Elvira Nathan Solis knew them all. Some of the most romantic, to be sure, involved members of the Solis family who, through the vellum pages of Dr. Stern’s book, can be seen to have evolved into present-day New York and Philadelphia Solises out of a series of dynastic marriages in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberia. It all began when a certain Marquesa Lopes (undoubtedly a distant ancestor of Aaron Lopez) married Fernao Jorge Da Solis and, at roughly the same time, Beatrice Pinto married Duarte Da Silva. The Da Silvas’ son married the Da Solises’ daughter, bringing the two houses together, and from then on—making use of the Spanish practice of appending the mother’s name to the surnames of the children—the family fell heir to the double name of Da Silva Solis or, as it was used in certain branches, Da Silva y Solis. This was all in the sixteenth century, and is remarkable in that the practice has been continued to this day. (Emily Nathan’s full name, for instance, is Emily Da Silva Solis Nathan.)

Dr. Stern’s book reveals such peripheral information about the Solis family as the fact that one Joseph Da Silva Solis, a London gold broker, was so good at his job that he earned the admiring nickname “El Dorado.” In one branch of the family, for several generations, the male heirs bore the hereditary title of Marquis de Montfort. Next to another name in the voluminous Solis family tree, Dr. Stern has made the sinister notation: “Murdered at Murney, Friday, October 17, 1817.”

The Solises, Aunt Ellie Solis liked to remind the children, were noted for producing strong-minded ladies. A number of Solis women, through history, have let their husbands retire to intellectual pursuits while the women ran the family business—or the country. A fifteenth-century example of this breed was Isabel de Solis, otherwise romantically known as “Zoraya the Morning Star.” Isabel, or Zoraya, was captured as a slave by Suley Hassan, the Moorish sultan of Granada, who made her his concubine. But so strong was her will, and so powerful was her allure, that she was soon running both the sultan and the sultanate. All American Solises also descend from Dona Isabel de Fonseca, a daughter of the Marquis of Turin and the Count of Villa Real and Monterrey, and Solomon da Silva Solis. In a plan masterminded by Dona Isabel, the pair escaped from Portugal disguised as Christians and were married as Jews in Amsterdam in 1670.

By the time Jacob da Silva Solis arrived in New York from London in 1803, the family fortunes were somewhat diminished. Jacob made an auspicious in-the-group marriage to David and Esther Hays’s daughter Charity, and took her with him to Wilmington, Delaware, where he opened a store. Jacob’s theory was that Wilmingtonians were doing too much of their shopping in nearby Philadelphia, and would save time and money by buying their dry-goods nearer home. Apparently he was

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