A Widening Security Under the Union Jack

I N G REAT B RITAIN , meanwhile, the government belatedly was taking a leaf from the Netherlands' example, allowing Jews to live openly, to worship and trade freely on English soil. A certain modest Jewish presence actually had developed even earlier, during the Cromwell regime. But once William III merged Britain and the Netherlands under the House of Orange in 1689, Dutch Sephardim began moving to England in more substantial numbers. They were joined by several thousand Central European Ashkenazim, eager to share in Britain's prosperity as the world's greatest trading power. As the most aggressive of the colonial empires, moreover, Britain by the late seventeenth century was prepared to countenance the provision of Jewish manpower and capital for its overseas possessions. A smattering of Jews surely was preferable to felons or indigents—or Roman Catholics. If treated well, they were likely to become loyal agents of colonialist policy. An official Board of Trade directive for Surinam (recently captured from the Dutch) summarized the British view: “Whereas we have found that the Hebrew nation now already resident here, have with their persons and property proved themselves useful and beneficial to this colony, [we are] desirous further to encourage them to continue their residence and trade here.”

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some two thousand Jews settled in the British West Indies. Most were Sephardim. They arrived, initially as marranos, from Portuguese Brazil and from the Spanish and Netherlands Antilles. Soon afterward, professing Jews arrived direct from Holland and from Britain itself. By the early 1700s, Jews were to be found in every one of Britain's Caribbean possessions, including 1,000 in Jamaica, 275 in Barbados, 75 in Nevis. Most were small tradesmen, but a substantial minority became important coffee and sugar planters. Although barred from holding office and serving on juries, they enjoyed full religious and economic freedom. Soon, then, they proved the Board of Trade's gamble a sound one. By the late eighteenth century, Britain was conducting one-third of its seaborne trade with the West Indies, and Jews had emerged as major figures in that commerce. Indeed, the largest share of the import-export trade between England and Jamaica was in their hands. Ample records attest to the Jews' comfortable homes, their plate and jewelry, their slaves. They also lived full-orbed Jewish lives. Jamaica possessed five synagogues by 1776, together with ritual baths, kosher abattoirs, Jewish schools. One of the students in Nevis's Jewish school was the young Alexander Hamilton, denied admission to the Anglican parish school as an illegitimate child.

Like other overseas colonists, however, this comfortable Jewish enclave gradually shared its activities with the more temperate North American mainland. By 1667, following Britain's conquest of New Netherlands (soon to be divided into the colonies of New York and New Jersey), the original pioneer Jewish community in New Amsterdam had all but vanished. Then with the enlargement of British settlement in ensuing decades, small numbers of Jews joined the migration to New York, and subsequently to other British mainland colonies. They numbered barely two hundred fifty by the end of the seventeenth century, in a white population of some eighty thousand. At first most were Sephardim, from England, Holland, or the Caribbean islands. Yet by the early eighteenth century increasing numbers among them were Ashkenazim from German-speaking Europe, Most of these were Dorfjuden , village Jews, who had not shared in the widening commercial opportunities of their city cousins. Few suffered overt physical persecution on the Continent any longer, but their economic disabilities remained vexatious, often crippling. Except for the Netherlands, Jews in Europe still were denied access to land ownership in the countryside, freedom of personal residence, the right to practice law and medicine. By contrast, these feudal restrictions had not been transplanted to the British overseas empire. So far as was known, the most daunting challenges in British North America were the Indians and the wilderness.

The assumption proved only partly correct. It was true that few of the Jewish newcomers endured quite the desperate economic circumstances of the original New Amsterdam Jews. Most were lowermiddle-class. They brought with them some modest savings and a certain mercantile experience. Most came as young bachelors, without the responsibility of families to limit their mobility. Even so, their legal status remained uncertain. On the one hand, they enjoyed the generalized protection of the royal government. On the other, they faced local doctrinal suspicions that often were as harsh as any they had endured in the Old World. By royal charter, London had delegatedz several of its North American colonies to the governance of intensely pietistic Christian Nonconformist groups. These sects were intent on maintaining their own theocratic oligarchies, their own tightly exclusionary religious societies. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, the established church was Congregationalist, the American version of English Puritan. Maryland initially was Catholic. In Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, British Anglicanism functioned as the established church. It was a denominational parochialism that created serious legal and economic obstacles to “nonbelievers.” At the least, it denied Jews—and usually Catholics—political equality to the very eve of the American Revolution.

In practice, circumstances varied from colony to colony. With its burgeoning trade economy, New York once again was the logical first port of call for Jews. Moreover, under the terms of the Treaty of Breda of 1667, Britain guaranteed full rights of worship, trade, individual property, and inheritance to all inhabitants of the former New Netherlands. The Jews shared in those rights. It was less than full citizenship, to be sure, with the attendant opportunity to hold office. Jews still were forbidden to build a synagogue, and even were obliged to pay taxes to the Anglican Church. But within a few decades, these restrictions lapsed. Among a Protestant community still largely obsessed by the historic danger of Roman Catholicism, a hundred or so local Jews hardly presented a threat. By the opening of the eighteenth century, New York's Jews were worshipping openly in their own Shearith Israel congregation (although still in rented facilities), voting in elections, serving on juries and as executors of estates. In 1718, Jews served as constables in three of New York's seven wards. Ten years later, they erected their first synagogue. By mid-century, they enjoyed most of the political rights of the Protestant majority, and far many more than those allowed Catholics.

In dour New England their experience was rather different. Here, except for Roger Williams's breakaway Rhode Island, nonCongregationalists were second-class citizens. The Jews were less than that. Rejecting the divinity of Jesus Christ, they were denied permission even to reside in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. In 1668, one Solomon, described as “ye Malata Jew,” was prosecuted in Essex County, Massachusetts, for “profaning the Lord's Day.” He was found traveling through Wenham on Sunday, en route to Piscatqua. The merchants Isaac Abrahams and Solomon Franco were “warned out” of New Hampshire as undesirable strangers. Then, in the aftermath of Britain's “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the colonial administration of New England gradually reverted to the hands of more tolerant royal governors. In ensuing years, the minuscule number of Jews who traded in Massachusetts and Connecticut rarely suffered deprivation. They were non-Catholics, after all. Soon they were purchasing and bequeathing homes, serving as witnesses in Boston courts, occasionally even functioning as constables.

As early as 1656, Jews were permitted residence rights in Quaker Pennsylvania and Anglican New Jersey. By the late eighteenth century they experienced only marginal limitations on the franchise and office-holding. The hundred or so Jews residing in Philadelphia by mid-century earned their livelihoods in relative security. It was only in Maryland that the universal fear of “papists” seriously imperiled the Jews' legal status. Originally a Catholic colony, Maryland assumed the religion of its Protestant majority by the mid-1600s. In their zeal, the latter disfranchised the former—and all other non-Protestants. In 1658 one Jacob Lumbrozo, a “Jew doctor” traveling through Maryland, had the breathtaking temerity to suggest in a conversation with a group of locals that Jesus was no more than a man, that his resurrection had been accomplished “by the Art Magick.” Lumbrozo was duly arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for blasphemy (when tactlessness alone might have earned him this fate). He was spared later that year when Richard Cromwell became Lord Protector of England and proclaimed a general amnesty. The blasphemy law remained on the books, in any case, together with injunctions against Jewish public worship and political rights of any sort. Meanwhile, in Anglican Virginia during the colonial period, Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews remained equally beyond the pale.

By contrast, South Carolina's constitution was framed by the English liberal political philosopher John Locke. Its ironclad guarantees of freedom of conscience excluded Catholics but included “Jews, heathens and disenters [ sic ]” Thus, from the moment a handful of Jews sailed into Charles Town harbor in 1680, they were free to worship and own property. By the early 1700s, Jews were voting in elections and in theory even were eligible for membership in the House of Assembly. Once South Carolina became populated, and its need for manpower less urgent, the older tidewater settlers moved to limit the franchise to Protestants; but even then, the tiny nucleus of Jews in Charles Town sensed little meaningful change. They continued to trade, to worship, to execute legal documents, to sit on juries. In neighboring Georgia, the Jewish experience was even more benign. Founded in 1733 by the English general-philanthropist James Oglethorpe, this vast plantation was envisaged as a haven for imprisoned debtors. As it happened, London also had its share of Jewish indigents, many of them newcomers from Eastern Europe. Traditionally, the Bevis Marks (Sephardic) synagogue assumed responsibility for the Jewish poor. It occurred to the synagogue board now that a better solution was to divert indigents to Oglethorpe's Georgia asylum and sustain them there.

The idea was rather less appealing to the plantation's trustees, who were alarmed lest Georgia “become a Jewish colony” and all their Christian settlers “fall off and depart as leaves from a tree in autumn.” Too late. By early 1734, the first contingent of forty-one Jews had arrived. Informed by lawyers that the Georgia charter tolerated all immigrants except Catholics, Governor Oglethorpe raised no further objections. Indeed, evincing no personal animus himself against Jews, he settled the newcomers on the fringes of his own tract of land, rented them a house for their religious services, allocated a plot for their cemetery. Over time, other handfuls of Jews arrived. They were a mixed bag of Sephardim and Ashkenazim, farmers and tradesmen, and their relations with their neighbors were entirely equable. In 1737 John Wesley, who spent two unhappy years in Georgia, wrote in his Journal: “I began learning Spanish, in order to converse with my Jewish parisoners [ sic ], some of whom seem nearer the mind that was in Christ than many who call him Lord.” Although the franchise and public office nominally were restricted to Protestants, Jews were participating in elections as early as mid-century. In 1765 two Jews were elected port officials of Savannah.

Altogether, by the mid-eighteenth century, Jews were experiencing a freedom of personal circumstance in North America that was functionally quite tolerable, if legally somewhat amorphous. The better to exploit their talents, moreover, and those of other non-Catholics, London set out to regularize the status of its overseas population. Under a new Uniform Naturalization Act of 1740, aliens henceforth would be qualified for citizenship provided they had been born or had resided for seven years in a British colony, and swore loyalty to the Crown. Jews residing in the British West Indies were the Act's initial beneficiaries. Some one hundred fifty of them acquired naturalization between 1740 and 1776, Others who achieved this status included thirty-five Jews in New York, about twenty in Pennsylvania, and one each in South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Maryland. Yet it was hardly the Act itself that determined the pace of Jewish normalization in the colonies. On the mainland, review of an applicant's credentials was the rather arbitrary prerogative of individual courts. Few Jews bothered to go that route. With every passing year, they preferred simply to exercise their de facto rights of domicile, trade, worship, and, increasingly, franchise. Eligibility for public office was not an urgent concern. The Uniform Naturalization Act—the first Jewish emancipatory measure to be issued by a modern European government—in effect acknowledged the existing fact of Jewish security and stability in colonial America. EJR/o3QY20QcgL3RQdULg6TB74nMar3xBC7CbV7hllCWDN6YsoAl0I/Wyo0l8MD1