Jews can have religious services any place, but you need hallowed ground for a burial. Although the Newport cemetery was established in 1677, Touro Synagogue was consecrated in 1763.

Touro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Rhode Island, established by the Sephardic Jewish immigrants originally from Spain and Portugal, who, fleeing the Inquisition, had next gone to Amsterdam and London, then to Brazil and finally Barbados. Arriving in Newport, they set up businesses dealing with shipping and commerce. Finally settled, they needed to buy land for a cemetery. While their congregation, Nephuse Israel (Scattered of Israel), did not have a building, they are considered the second oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. Land was bought by Mordechai Campanal and Moses Pacheco at the corner of what is now Kay and Touro Streets.

Who is buried in the cemetery? Almost all of those early settlers had Hispanic names: Alvares, Levy, Lopez, Rivera, Rodriguez, Seixas, Touro, and, interestingly enough, Hayes (see Longfellow’s poem below). Some of them died at a young age: Jacob Lopez (1755 - 1764), while others far exceeded the life expectancy of their era: Mrs. Judith Levy (1700 - 1788). In total, there are 44 burials, with the most recent being Edwin Rosenstein (1866). As a specifically Jewish cemetery, only Jews were buried there.

A fence was put around the plot, for which Judah Touro, Abraham’s brother, donated $11,000 in 1842. However, by 1850 the cemetery was rarely being used, as the Jewish population of Newport had fallen. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited the site and wrote a melancholy poem, The Jewish Cemetery at Newport, about how deserted it was;

The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes;

Alvares and Rivera interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!

The groaning earth in travail and in pain

Brings forth its races, but does not restore,

And the dead nations never rise again.

In contrast to this view, Emma Lazarus, the famous Jewish poet who wrote the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, wrote a rebuttal of Longfellow, In the Jewish Cemetery at Newport, with a feeling of hope at the end:

For youth and happiness have followed age,

And green grass lieth gently over all.

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,

With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,

Before the mystery of death and God.

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In the mood for a seance? If you were a member of the cultural elite in 19th-century Providence, all signs would have pointed to yes. East Side artists and intellectuals attended seances held in private homes, which also played host to literary salons that engaged with the hot topics of the day. These topics included Spiritualism, which had given rise to the mania for seances, and Transcendentalism, the philosophical movement that advocated for the inherent goodness of man and nature. Today we associate Transcendentalism most readily with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts, but Rhode Island had its share of luminaries involved in the movement, including Margaret Fuller and Sarah Helen Whitman. Margaret Fuller, journalist, educator, and advocate for women’s rights, briefly took up residence as a teacher in Providence’s Greene Street School. Whitman, born and bred in the city, associated in Fuller’s circle and was a well-known poet. Fuller, Whitman, and many other artists and writers would often gather in what quickly became a 19th-century cultural hub of Providence: the Athenaeum on Benefit Street.

 This Greek Revival-style library generated more than just abstract ideas and elevated conversation: love blossomed here between two writers. Having spotted her first in a rose garden and where he fell madly in love, Edgar Allen Poe courted Sarah Helen Whitman in the Athenaeum in 1845. Their courtship was short-lived, however: Whitman called off their engagement in 1848 when Poe’s sobriety came into question.

 In the next century, Providence inspired the work of another creative writer, H.P. Lovecraft, who set his novel “The Shunned House” (1924) in a colonial house down the street from the Athenaeum, at 135 Benefit Street.

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