A new exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland sheds light on the experience of Jews in 19th-century America, through the lens of one man who saw and did it all. Colonel Mendes Cohen — who was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1796 and settled in Baltimore, then the country’s third largest city, at the age of 12 — is a well-chosen exemplar. His father was German and his mother was English, and when the family arrived in Baltimore there were only about 150 Jews in the city and no formal Jewish institutions.
The interest of “The A-Mazing Mendes Cohen” is documentary rather than artifactual: There are a few pieces of tableware from the Cohens’ home on display, but most of the one-room exhibition consists of kid-friendly historical factoids arranged into a confusing maze of pea-green tarp.
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