Treasure Trove: Human Zoos and Words for Jews

Can you imagine going to see humans from different cultures on display? That is precisely what people would do in the 1800s and early 1900s when they visited human zoos or ethnic villages to see people such as Indigenous Americans, West Africans, Samoans and Inuit in their “natural” state. The 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago hosted such an attraction. One of the groups on display were Jews who made up 80% of the inhabitants of the Turkish village.

The manager of the Turkish Village was Robert Levy whose company received the concession to mount this attraction. Most of the clerks, actors, servants, musicians and dancers in the village were Jews who, on Yom Kippur, turned the life size model of a Turkish mosque into a synagogue where Kol Nidre services were held. The next day, the mosque was too small and the services spilled into the streets of the model bazaar (whose shops were closed for the day).

The bazaar was run by a professional interpreter (known as a dragoman like the Hebrew word for translation, letargem) [See: https://thecjn.ca/arts-culture/treasure-trove-recalls-the-challenges-of-travelling-to-the-holy-land/], guide and store owner from Constantinople named Far-Away Moses. Moses was Mark Twain’s guide in Turkey which he wrote about in Innocents Abroad where Twain describes his 1867 trip to Europe and the middle-east (including a stop in the Land of Israel). This made him a celebrity to English speaking tourists to Turkey, which he parlayed into a chain of stores called “Far Away Moses and Company” which opened across the Ottoman Empire and expanded to New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

When the fair ended, a book of portraits of the participants from various cultures that appeared in the fair’s attractions was published. The book includes this portrait of Far Away Moses. 

The caption under the photo reads in part:

“The Jews are the most remarkable of all races. No other people can boast a lineage so ancient and so unbroken…Representatives of their race have achieved eminence in every walk of life; as musicians, poets, philosophers and above all as financiers.”

That is a compliment mixed in with a stereotype from 1893, which is much better than the insults we hear in 2026.

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Treasure Trove is a program of The Herzl Project. Another program is The #Herzl100. 100 Herzl artifacts will be posted over 100 days on Instagram, FaceBook and TikTok.  The first seventy episodes are now available on YouTube. The first 80 episodes on YouTube can be found here:

Numbers 29 to 20:  https://youtu.be/4WnyNTUmU8s

Search #Herzl100 on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook to see, like and share the individual episodes to date, with the Top 12 aretfacts still to come! A new one drops every day.

For more treasures from the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, which has appeared weekly in the Treasure Trove column in the Canadian Jewish News (www.thecjn.ca) since February 2021, see https://herzlcollection.com/treasure-trove