https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-slavery-and-judaism-slaveholder-judah-monis-hebrew-professor-founders-11651172214?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Stoll is managing editor of Education Next, based at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The first Jew at Harvard was a slaveholder. That’s the bombshell, so far as I can tell, buried in the appendix of the new report “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” released by the university this week.
The report’s “list of human beings enslaved by prominent Harvard affiliates” includes the “enslaved persons” Cuffy and Cicely, owned by Judah Monis. Monis lived from 1683 to 1764 and was an instructor in Hebrew at Harvard College from 1722 to 1760. In researching this article, I discovered a third possible slave, “my Negro child Moreah,” mentioned in Monis’s 1760 will.
I first encountered Monis’s name more than a decade ago while working on a biography of the American revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. Part of the required curriculum for Harvard students from 1735 to 1755 was the study of Hebrew grammar from a textbook written by Monis. That might seem like an obscure detail, but it’s of historical significance because Harvard students in that era included Samuel Adams, his cousin and the future President John Adams, and their fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, William Williams, and William Ellery.
Monis had converted to Christianity from Judaism one month before joining the Harvard faculty. In a 2018 article for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jon D. Levenson writes that the conversion had been a condition of hiring. The baptism took place in Harvard Yard. “Although doubts about Monis’s sincerity in converting have long been raised, I am certain that he was absolutely sincere in his desire for a Harvard professorship,” Mr. Levenson writes.