I was born in Charleston, at 14 Wragg Square—the sixth generation to live in that house, and the fifth generation to be born there. It was a wonderful house, a square house, with porches across the front, both downstairs and upstairs, and two bedrooms. You entered into a central hall with two rooms to the left and two rooms to the right, and on the left was the parlor, which was for company. Behind it was my father’s study. On the right was the dining room, and behind it was the kitchen—all four big square rooms.
      We lived on the Meeting Street end, and it had a high brick wall, which we sat on to watch parades. Circus parades used to come down Meeting Street and we sat there. The garage had been a carriage house with stalls in the rear. Upstairs was where they had the oats, the hay. We used to love to climb up there.
      There were servants quarters in the back, which I imagine originally were for slaves, but they were rentals. The family lived in the house for ninety-nine years and paid rent. Never owned it. There were also colored families living back there. One of them was our washwoman. You sent out the laundry, but I know you always investigated the house where the laundress lived, because she took it home and washed it and dried it and ironed it and brought it back. I remember there was one old black man there that we used to like to talk to and visit with. His name was Smalls. He had a pushcart. I remember we just enjoyed talking to him. I don’t remember what about, especially. But he had a pushcart.
      The downstairs porch floor was slate, so you could skate on it. We had a joggling board there. We had wonderful rocking chairs and in all the ninety-nine years the family ever lived there, only one time was anything ever stolen from that porch. I think it was a rocking chair too.

Mordenai Lazarus Raisin Hirsch

…one branch of the family traces itself back to Luis de Torres, who sailed with Columbus in 1492. It says Columbus took Luis along as an interpreter on the first voyage of discovery because he knew Hebrew and a little Arabic. They didn’t know where they were going and they thought they needed interpreters of all kinds.

Virginia Moïse Rosefield more by this narrator

The Ambassador
Abraham Moïse and his wife, Sarah—they came in 1791. They came at the time there was a slave uprising in Santa Domingo. He was an ambassador to Santa Domingo and a planter. He had a plantation and a very prosperous business, and they had to escape in the night with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Virginia Moïse Rosefield more by this narrator

A Very Famous Dessert
[We] always had hired help that I ever heard of because you see the first Moïse came over here after a slave [uprising] in Santo Domingo. He had a strong feeling against slavery and taught it to the others. I am surmising that. He didn’t think it was right and he evidently passed that down to his children and from them on down, ’cause I don’t recall that anybody ever mentioned having a slave.
      We had a very fine butler—’course everybody had butlers and things like that. He would churn ice cream in the hand-cranked churn, then he’d pack it. We didn’t have any freezers, you know, then. You may not remember that time, but I do. Esau would pack this ice cream and keep it packed solid all day long until it was hard, real hard. When they were ready for dessert, he’d take it out of that ice, dip it in a pot of boiling water and slide the whole thing onto a platter this big. That was a very famous dessert in Sumter.

Virginia Moïse Rosefield more by this narrator

The Middle of the Universe
Most important was the fact that the house was in the middle of the universe. It was in the middle of Charleston. I knew this because if you climbed out of an attic window onto the slate roof, then slid up to the chimney and stood up holding on to it, you could just see the Ashley river to the west and, sometimes, the smokestack of a ship in the Cooper river to the east. Church steeples were the major features of the skyline: Grace Episcopal right down Wentworth Street, the Lutheran and Unitarian steeples on Archdale, St. Matthews on King Street, and way in the distance, far removed from our house, St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s. With all of those churches, we were in the middle of the religious universe.
      Five blocks away, of course, was Beth Elohim, clearly the center of Jewish thought in this country. At least it was in 1840, when KKBE’s first Reform rabbi, Gustavus Posnanski, proclaimed “Charleston is my Jerusalem.” If a rabbi said that now he would be defrocked, or whatever you do to errant rabbis who don’t preach the gospel as currently interpreted. There were a couple of synagogues uptown where the Orthodox kids went, but we really didn’t pay them much attention. Their families had only been in this country a generation and we were told, “It takes three generations to make an American.” We were Americans first and Jews second.
      We had the oldest and best municipal college in the country, the oldest and best museum in the United States, famous authors like Dubose Heyward, a lot of painters, a church where George Washington had worshiped, the News and Courier that probably everyone in the country read, and we had the Ashley and Cooper Rivers that flowed together off the Battery to form the Atlantic Ocean. I never really believed that it formed the whole ocean, but I did believe our house was the center of everything really important geographically, spiritually and culturally.

Dr. Arthur V. Williams Tales of Charleston, 1930s