Rebekah Hyneman (néeGumpert) (Hebrew: רבקה הינמן; 8 September 1812 – 10 September 1875) was an AmericanJewish author and poet, best known for her 1853 work The Leper and Other Poems.
In 1835, she married Jewish jewellery peddler Benjamin Hyneman.[3] They had two children, Elias Leon (born in 1837) and Samuel (born in 1839).[1] She was left a widow after five years of married life when in 1839, while she was pregnant with Samuel, Benjamin disappeared on a business trip to Texas and was presumed murdered.[4][5] Rebekah and her sons formally converted to Judaism in 1845 under the aegis of Rabbi Isaac Leeser.[6]
Hyneman turned to writing, becoming a regular contributor to The Occident and American Jewish Advocate and The Masonic Mirror and Keystone, founded by prominent Freemason Leon Hyneman, brother of her late husband and husband of her sister Sarah.[7] She wrote for these periodicals a number of original stories, essays, and poems, and frequently presented translations from the works of different foreign authors.[8] Her poetry and fiction were mainly on Jewish themes,[9] and often dealt with the need to resist assimilation.[10] Between 1846 and 1850, she published in The Occident “Female Scriptural Characters,” a series of poems paying homage to fourteen women of the Bible and the Apocrypha, including Ruth, Esther, Deborah, Judith, and the Matriarchs.[7][11] A collection of over eighty poems entitled The Leper and Other Poems appeared in 1853, which included her best-known poems “The Leper,” “Zara,” “Livia," and “The Muses”.[3][12]
^Lichtenstein, Diane (Spring 1988). "Fannie Hurst and Her Nineteenth-Century Predecessors". Studies in American Jewish Literature. 7 (1): 26–39. JSTOR41205672.