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Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (July 1, 1788 – June 23, 1838) was an American educator and correspondent with the children's writer Maria Edgeworth.

Early life and education

Rachel Mordecai was born in Virginia, the eldest daughter and second child of Jacob Mordecai and his first wife, Judith Myers. She was raised in Warrenton, North Carolina, where her father worked at a boys' school, then opened his own girls' school in 1809, with 21-year-old Rachel as one of the school's teachers. Rachel taught at her father's school until 1818.

Correspondence with Maria Edgeworth

Rachel Mordecai first wrote to author Maria Edgeworth in 1815. Mordecai studied and admired the enlightened educational writings of Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and was disappointed by the unflattering stereotypical portrait of a Jewish character in Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812). Edgeworth's Harrington (1817) made a better effort at a Jewish character, in response to the criticism from Miss Mordecai. The families of Maria Edgeworth and Rachel Mordecai stayed in correspondence for over a hundred years after Rachel's death, until World War II.

Marriage and children

Rachel Mordecai married widower Aaron Marks Lazarus in 1821, and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived for the rest of her life. The Lazaruses had four children together, three daughters and a son, M. E. Lazarus, in a household that also included Mr. Lazarus's seven children from his first marriage. In 1835, when Rachel Lazarus announced that she felt moved to convert to Christianity, her husband threatened to keep her from her children. She was baptized on her deathbed in Petersburg, Virginia, a week before her 50th birthday.

Rachel Mordecai Lazarus's letters are in the Mordecai Family Papers at the Southern Historical Collection, the Pattie Mordecai Collection in the North Carolina State Archives, and the Jacob Mordecai Papers at Duke University, among other collections.

References

1. Bingham, Emily. "Rachel Mordecai Lazarus". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
2. Emily Bingham, "American, Jewish, Southern, Mordecai: Constructing Identities to 1865" in Marcia Cohen Ferris and Mark I Greenberg, eds., Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History (UPNE 2006): 46. ISBN 9781584655893
3. "Rachel Mordecai Lazarus" in Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, Women Critics, 1660-1820: An Anthology (Indiana University Press 1995): 391. ISBN 9780253209634
4. Catherine Craft-Fairchild, "The 'Jewish Question' on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Harrington and the Correspondence between Maria Edgeworth and Rachel Mordecai Lazarus" Eighteenth-Century Life 38(3)(2014): 30-63. doi: 10.1215/000982601-2773963
5. Jean E. Friedman, Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period (University of Georgia Press 2001): 66. ISBN 9780820322520
6. Emily Bingham, "Rachel Lazarus Mordecai" Jewish Women's Archive (March 2009).
7. Edgar E. MacDonald, The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Maria Edgeworth and Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (University of North Carolina Press 1977, reissued 2011). ISBN 9780807897171
8. Emily Bingham, "'Thou Knowest Not What a Day May Bring Forth': Intellect, Power, Conversion, and Apostasy in the Life of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (1788-1838)," in Donald G. Matthews and Beth Barton Schweiger, eds., Rethinking Religion in the American South (University of North Carolina Press 2004).
9. Mordecai Family Papers 1649-1947, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC.
10. "Guide to the Jacob Mordecai Papers, 1784-1936" Duke University Libraries.

• 1788 births
• 1838 deaths
• American Ashkenazi Jews
• American educators
• American Episcopalians
• American people of English descent
• American people of English-Jewish descent
• American people of German-Jewish descent
• Converts to Anglicanism from Judaism
• Mordecai family
• People from Warrenton, North Carolina
• Jews from North Carolina
• Jews from Virginia