Doron Ben-Atar Photo by Angie Chen

In New England in 1796, a man in his eighties was convicted of bestiality and sentenced to death by hanging. Then, three years later, this same scenario repeated itself 70 miles away.

“The similarities were so striking that this could not just be coincidence, because nothing like this has ever happened before or since—the charging of two men in their eighties with such an act,” said Ben-Atar, a Fordham history professor who specializes in early America.

The significance of the two cases is detailed in Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), published April 4. Ben-Atar’s co-author is Richard Brown, Ph.D., Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut.

The two cases reflect larger tensions and anxieties about changes in American society, such as challenges to religious orthodoxy, cultural changes regarding sexuality, and a market revolution that was changing traditional economic arrangements, Ben-Atar said. In the New England interior, where both cases occurred, a sort of flashback to Puritan times was spurred by the spread of cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment ideals.

Also reflected in the cases was the political divide between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians, who were more sympathetic to France and the French Revolution. In one of the cases, Federalists did the prosecuting and the defense was handled by Jeffersonians.

The cases occurred in 1796 in Hampshire County, Mass., and in 1799 in Litchfield County, Conn. In addition to the charge, the sentence, and the age of the accused, the cases share other similarities, Ben-Atar said. Both men lived in farming communities adjacent to rising metropolitan areas, and both were marginal members of society. (One was a cancer doctor, a profession that commanded far less respect than it does today, and the other had spiraled downward financially throughout his life.)

Also surprising was the rush to prosecute two men who were at a stage of life that few people living in that century reached at all. “You would expect these people in their eighties to be kind of respected,” he said.

Ben-Atar characterizes the book as “microhistory,” or an effort to look in between the big events of the past to examine episodes that reveal things about society at a given time. Because of the obscurity of the cases, he said, researching them was a challenge.

The good kind, that is.

“It’s one of those fun detective things that you do as a historian,” he said.

Doron Ben-Atar, Ph.D., professor of history in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, has a special interest in transgression.

As a teacher, scholar and playwright, Ben-Atar said he likes crossing boundaries to engender new ideas. In his teaching, he routinely assigns provocative materials that he hopes will jolt students into seeing things from a new perspective.

“I am a historian drawn to challenging reigning interpretations,” said Ben-Atar, who teaches a course on sexuality in America and who specializes in early American history. “My goal is not to offer students answers or conclusions, but to allow them to see different possible forms of narration. History is great because it allows you to do so.”

In a new work-in-progress for Yale University Press, The Beast with Two Backs: Sexual Transgression in Early New England, Ben Atar and co-author Richard Brown, Ph.D., of the University of Connecticut, are analyzing the punishment of bestiality in the early America.

Ben-Atar and Brown each stumbled upon seemingly isolated incidents of prosecution for bestiality in the late 1700s. Both incidents occurred within three years of each other, 60 miles apart, and involved similar perpetrators and outcomes. In 1796, John Farrell of Hampshire County, Mass., was convicted of “a venereal affair with a certain Brute animal.” In 1799, Gideon Washburn of Litchfield County, Conn., was convicted of having sex with two mares and a cow.

What stood out for the researchers were that both perpetrators were octogenarians, and both were sentenced to death by public hanging.

Bestiality, Ben-Atar said, occurs among a small percentage of people in all societies—especially farming communities and sexually conservative cultures—and especially among adolescents. But no one had been executed for bestiality since the witch trial hysteria nearly 140 years earlier; and never had the accused been in his eighties.

“At the time, the decision to execute was a very radical decision,” Ben-Atar said. “Whatever elite and vernacular prohibitions dominated Americans’ beliefs about bestiality, in actual practice they treated bestial acts as venial transgressions.

“So we wondered what was going on here,” he said.

Part of what was happening, said Ben-Atar, was a struggle over identity among the new Americans, who were caught between Old World alliances and their fresh status, and whose rulers were insecure. In a nation new to consensus-building, there was bitter political strife between Federalists (supporters of the British Empire) and Jeffersonians (pro-France and the French Revolution).

Additionally, in the religious arena, a “restorationist” Puritanism in small New England counties, such as Litchfield and Hampshire, had begun to take root. This Second Great Awakening clashed bitterly with the more cosmopolitan Protestantism and Enlightenment ideals taking root, Ben-Atar said.

While attempts were underway in some cities and states to curb the use of the death penalty for sexual crimes such as sodomy, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut kept the statute.

“The country had no strong sense of identity, so regional, family and religious identities far surpassed loyalties to the abstraction called the United States of America,” Ben-Atar said.

Such themes and alliances played themselves out in the trials of these men—particularly in the Washburn trial. At 83 years old, Washburn was reported to be suffering from dementia. Yet his attorneys’ attempts to have him declared unfit for trial were scorned by an overzealous chief justice, Jesse Root, who remanded Washburn for his “vile drudgery of sin and Satan.”

Similar rhetoric of being “seduced by instigation of the Devil” was leveled against Farrell, whose death sentence was eventually pardoned by Gov. Sam Adams. (Washburn, mercifully, died of a stroke days before his execution.)

“In times of anxiety, sexual repression jumps to the forefront of society,” Ben-Atar said. “We don’t know much of what people did (sexually), but (through history) we do know how society reacts to certain transgressions.”

Ben-Atar pointed to similar phenomena. During the McCarthy Communist “witch hunt” of the 1950s, he said, prosecutions against homosexuals were at a peak even though homosexuality was not particularly on the rise. Then in the 1980s, there was a nationwide day care sexual abuse hysteria that led to wrongful convictions of teachers.

Throughout U.S. history, there has been a Janus-faced sexual identity that makes it one of the most permissive—and yet most puritanical—sexual cultures.

In fact, said Ben-Atar, students are often surprised when he reveals the nation’s shifting historical attitudes toward abortion. “Many of them are surprised that, in the 19th century, abortion was quite common and practitioners regularly advertised their services in newspapers,” he said.

As the cases of Washburn and Farrell demonstrate, cultural and societal attitudes toward what sexual transgression is, and is not, are constantly in flux.

“Our relationship with sexuality is one of the most telling things about society and its secrets—then and now,” Ben-Atar said.

In addition to his current work, he wrote and published Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Making of America (Yale University Press, 2004), which undermines the idea of American intellectual property as “something taken from us” by other nations. Instead, the book exposes it as “something that we often take from developing nations and claim as our own,” he said.

He is also the co-author of the memoir, What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust (University of Virginia Press, 2006), and two plays: Behave Yourself Quietly (2007) andPeace Warriors (2009).

“I like to draw from multiple disciplines,” said Ben-Atar, “and employ a variety of writing genres.”

– Janet Sassi

“The latrine [at Auschwitz-Birkenau]was like our coffeeshop . . . it’s where we could laugh and gossip,” the woman recalled, visiting Auschwitz sixty years after her imprisonment there.

That quotation hit Doron Ben-Atar, Ph.D., chairman of the Department of History, like a clap of thunder; not just because he is a Jew, but because the woman who spoke the words is his mother. Although Ben-Atar had written a book about his mother’s Holocaust experiences, What Time and Sadness Spared (University of Virginia Press, 2006), and thought he knew his mother’s story “better than everybody else,” that little detail — gossip in the midst of such unbearable atrocity — had escaped him.

“I remember thinking, this has to be a play,” he said. “That the latrines would be the place where these people, who had to act like machines all day long, could go to gossip, and bicker, and do what other human beings do, was absurd. But there they could be themselves.”

On April 28, Ben-Atar’s play, Behave Yourself Quietly, premiered at the Little Theatre in New Haven, Conn. The three-act play explores the lives and dreams of three women prisoners who, in an intimate moment, share their hopes for freedom after getting word that an inmate has escaped and will help get them liberated. Ben-Atar based the play on his mother’s experiences. As a young woman, Roma Ben-Atar had been at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, when Mala Zimetbaum escaped from the Nazi’s with the help of her boyfriend and a stolen SS uniform. Zimetbaum, who had been chosen to work in the camp offices by the commander Maria Mandl, was a heroine among the inmates. She had stolen medicine for them and was rumored to have saved some of them from the gas chambers by changing numbers in the death logbook.

“When she escaped, the inmates were elated,” said Ben-Atar. “But for the commander this was the worst betrayal of all. Mala was her weak spot.”

The play, which starts on a humorous, hopeful note with the latrine scene, takes a dramatic turn when Zimetbaum is captured and brought back to the camp to be executed. Without giving away the details, Ben-Atar says the ending speaks to “what is the meaning of heroism, of resistance.”

Behave Yourself Quietly is Ben-Atar’s first attempt at playwriting. As a historian, his publishing resumé includes three scholarly books and a large collection of articles; not the prerequisite for a creative writing project. But the Holocaust has been a topic he always wanted to tackle on a personal level. Although his mother didn’t speak of it, “everybody knew what the number on her arm meant.”

He worked on the script for two years, saying that his first draft was “very intellectual.”

“But we don’t talk in high-falutin’ language. Some of the lines I thought were the best turned out to be the worst lines in the script,” he said. “I learned to think of dramatic moments, rather than a history lesson I want to teach.” He credits his director, Jane Tamarkin, with helping him hone the work.

Proceeds from Ben-Atar’s play will provide scholarship money for The March of the Living, a program that sends students to Poland for a first-hand look at the concentration camps. The students walk the two miles from Auschwitz to the site of the gas chambers, Ben-Atar said, “so that we don’t not forget where it [anti-semitism] leads: it leads to Birkenau.”

– Janet Sassi