Prefigurations of Comprehensive Emancipation

I N THE IMMEDIATE post-Revolutionary period, American Jews assumed that their religious freedom and civil security were decisively anchored. President Washington himself confirmed the assumption. Upon his inauguration, acknowledging congratulations from several Jewish congregations, Washington replied that “the inhabitants of every denomination” were fully included under the protection of the new American republic. In his response to the Newport congregation, the president appropriated the stately and orotund language used in the letter to him from Moses Seixas, the synagogue president:

Indeed, Washington's pledge of a new political freedom was implicit in the very phraseology of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal”—not “all Protestants,” or even “all Christians.” Thomas Jefferson's celebrated Act of Religious Freedom, passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1785, asserted that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatever,” and it was this concept that Jefferson translated intact into the federal Constitution. Similarly, the Constitution provided that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The assurance was proclaimed that same year in the Northwest Ordinance, the act establishing a federal territory north of the Ohio River. In 1791, moreover, the First Amendment renewed the commitment to religious freedom, affirming that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof... . ”

And yet these declarations were all essentially federal, not state, guarantees. Jews as well as Catholics discovered that sectarian insecurities did not evaporate with national independence. The very Protestants who supported the Constitution's freedom-and-equality provisions now resisted change closer to home, in the original thirteen states. Although none of the state governments was particularly interested any longer in tampering with the free exercise of religion, few seemed interested in permitting Jews—or Catholics—the right to hold public office. Eight of the original states continued to deny Jews equal political rights. Maryland was among these. During the 1820s, one Thomas Kennedy, a committed liberal, became an unremitting champion of Jewish political equality. For his efforts, he was labeled an “enemy of Christianity,” “Judas Iscariot,” “one half not a Jew, the other half not a Christian.” In 1826, when the Maryland legislature amended the state constitution, it permitted Jews to assume public office only on condition that they express their belief “in a future state of rewards and punishments.” Several generations would pass before Maryland law finally conformed to the United States Constitution.

In Massachusetts, the public temper appeared equally grudging. “As to Jews, Mahometans, deists and atheists,” proclaimed Senator Leverett Saltonstall, “they are all opposed to the common religion of the Commonwealth and believe it an imposition, a mere fable... . Are such persons suitable rulers for a Christian state?” Local voters evidently thought not. It was 1833 before the Massachusetts legislature eliminated the religious test. North Carolina was the last of the original thirteen states to grant Jews political equality. Although an occasional Jew won election to the state legislature, he could not be seated. “Must we then swear a Turk on the Koran?” protested one legislator in 1835. “Must we separate the Holy Scriptures that we must swear on the Old Testament?” North Carolina's constitution remained intact until a Reconstruction legislature instituted the change—in 1868!

It was not discriminatory state laws alone that had to be amended. Federal policies also required endless monitoring. As in Europe, conservatives tended to regard an established religion as a bulwark against political and social change. Thus, in the early United States, the Federalists remained plainspoken opponents of political rights for non-Christians. Typically, they camouflaged their aristocratic bias as a defense of Anglo-Christian values. The Jews knew where they stood with this faction. Better than most, they sensed the underlying animus toward the French and other “foreigners” in President John Adams's 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Almost unanimously, then, they gave their political loyalty to the Jeffersonian Democrats. As the architect of religious freedom in America, Jefferson himself was a venerated figure in Jewish households. Hardly less so was his devoted lieutenant, James Madison, who had introduced the First Amendment into the Constitution. Accordingly, Jews who were active in politics gravitated almost reflexively to the incipient Democratic clubs of the time. Solomon Simpson, a founder of New York's Tammany Society in 1794, became its president three years later. Several Jewish merchants in Philadelphia were prominent Democrats. Well after the demise of the Federalist party itself, following the War of 1812, Jews remained wedded to the Democrats. Indeed, they appeared as Democratic members of city councils, occasionally as Democratic small-town mayors, eventually as influential Democratic politicians in New York.

Their vigilance was warranted. For all the gradual normalization of their political status, Jews remained a suspect minority well into the Federal period. During the earlier colonial years, Jews faced the immemorial accusation of deicide. “The guilt of the blood of the Lord of Heaven and Earth lyeth upon the [Jewish] nation,” thundered Increase Mather in 1669. Thirty years later, the Reverend Samuel Willard of Boston, shortly to succeed Mather as president of Harvard, warned that Jews “were made a scorn and reproach to the world ... for the horrible contempt which they cast upon Christ and his gospel.” As late as 1747, Pastor Heinrich Mühlenberg of Pennsylvania insisted that the Jews were “spiritually doomed” unless they became Christians. Well after religious passions eased in the later eighteenth century, or became confined to a minority among the fundamentalist Right (see this page ), stereotypes of Jewish roguery continued to flourish. Ezra Stiles, a devoted admirer of Aaron Lopez, could believe and repeat a Revolutionary War legend of an “international Jewish intelligence system” controlled from a back street in London.

In 1798, as Jews were becoming prominent in the Democratic party, the New York editor and vociferous Federalist James Rivington identified the local Democratic party branch by its very physiognomy: “[The members] all seem to be like their Vice-President [Solomon Simpson]... of the tribe of Shylock; they have that leering underlook, and malicious grin that seem to say to the honest man— approach me not ” Under this theory, all Jeffersonians presumably were under the influence of Jews, each of whom “vash vorking for de monish, dat vash all.” In the debate over Alexander Hamilton's proposal for government funding of war debts, a satirist writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette suggested the project's ulterior goal was that “spies and Jews may ride in coaches.” Even the greathearted Jefferson in an unguarded moment lamented that “[among Jews] ethics are so little understood.” In the early decades of the new republic, Jews remained at best an object of curiosity, more commonly of faint distrust or distaste.

Nevertheless, active hostility was far rarer in the early United States than in contemporary Europe—even than in contemporary England. The rationalism that informed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution infused the public ethos. So did frontier egalitarianism (see this page ). And so did the sheer cultural diversity of the New World. By 1820, except for Rhode Island, citizens of British stock comprised at most 60 percent of the settled white population, possibly not more than half in New York, and less than 35 percent in Pennsylvania. Above all, economic achievement exerted its decisive impact on an expanding nation. It was specifically the “Protestant,” capitalist ethic that transformed financial success into political and even social acceptance, Jewish economic fortunes in the post-Revolutionary era revived unevenly, to be sure. Philadelphia, home for a (partly refugee) population of some five hundred Jews in the last year of the war, lost half its Jewry by the late 1780s. The once-flourishing port city of Newport failed altogether to recover from the trauma of British occupation, and its postwar Jewish settlement eventually diminished almost to the last soul. Longfellow eulogized the departure:

Yet New York revived handsomely after the war, and within two decades reigned uncontested as America's business center. Although its Jewish community grew at a rather slower pace, reaching five hundred only in the second decade of the nineteenth century, eventually this vigorous minority also shared in the city's affluence. Benjamin Seixas, Isaac Gomez, Alexander Zuntz, and Ephraim Hart co-founded the Stockbrokers Guild—later the New York Stock Exchange. With Isaac Moses, Hayman Levy, and Solomon Simpson, Seixas also became a major shareholder in the newly founded Bank of New York. Indeed, continuing to prosper in the fur trade, Hart had become the wealthiest Jew in New York by the opening of the nineteenth century. His son Bernhard (grandfather of the writer Bret Harte) furnished arms and clothing to the citizen army during the War of 1812 and became secretary of the Stock Exchange. Most Jews were small merchants, with a scattering of artisans and professionals. But as New York's business activity increased, so did Jewish participation.

Until well after the Revolution, too, most of the city's Jews lived near their original seventeenth-century quasi ghetto, clustered around their Shearith Israel synagogue on Mill Street. Their homes and businesses were located on neighboring Stone, Beaver, and Broad streets, at Hanover Square, and on lower Broadway. Then, as the city began shifting northward, the Jews shared in the migration. By the 1820s, most of them had settled around West Broadway. The wealthier families lived along Greenwich, Laight, Greene, Pearl, Water, Wooster, and Crosby streets; the poorer, along Broome, Houston, Canal, and Franklin streets. A pattern of “uptown” and “downtown” Jews already was developing.

Quite unexpectedly, meanwhile, the single most impressive upsurge of Jewish population in America occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. This tropical port city recovered from the war with hardly a pause, and its convenient location along the southern trade routes to the British and Dutch West Indies opened an epoch of unprecedented prosperity. Among the influx of newcomers, Jews arrived from England and the Netherlands, from Central Europe and Poland, from older Sephardic enclaves in the Caribbean. By the turn of the century, no fewer than five hundred Jews were living in Charleston, vying with New York as the nation's single largest Jewish settlement. They ranged from small retailers to large importer-exporters. Elsewhere in the South, the Monsanto family built Natchez's wharf facilities and helped transform their community into a thriving Mississippi port. Abraham Mordecai arrived in Alabama in 1785, traded with the Creek Indian nation, took a Creek woman for his wife, founded the town of Montgomery, and built its first cotton gin. Beyond the South, Jews continued to trade and travel. In 1792 Jacob Franks established several lumber mills as a founding member of Green Bay, in the Wisconsin Territory. In 1793 John Hays arrived in Cahokia, the first permanent settlement in the Illinois territory. A fur trader, Hays later became the territory's first postmaster, its first sheriff, its first tax collector.

During the early Federal period, Jews similarly were gaining entrance to professional and public life. In New York, several Jews were admitted to the practice of law and medicine. Gershom Mendes Seixas, returning after the war to resume the spiritual leadership of the Shearith Israel congregation, was appointed a regent of Columbia University. In Philadelphia, Moses Levy served as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, then as president judge of the District Court of Philadelphia, the nation's most important trial court. When Levy died in 1824, the Philadelphia Bar Association requested its members to wear a crepe armband for thirty days. At least a dozen Jewish physicians and lawyers practiced in Charleston. Elisha Levy, Mark Marks, and Solomon Moses, Jr., served consecutively as Charleston deputy sheriffs. From 1810 on, several Jews sat in the South Carolina legislature, and Lyon Levy was state treasurer from 1817 to 1822. Elsewhere throughout the early United States, Haym B. Salomon, son of the financier, was a captain of the Tenth Infantry Brigade during the War of 1812. In the same war, Captain Mordecai Myers and Major Abraham A. Massias were badly wounded and decorated. Commodore Uriah P. Levy saw repeated action until he was taken captive by the British, to spend sixteen months in Dartmoor Prison. After the war, upon repatriation, Levy resumed his naval career, eventually serving as flagship commodore of the United States squadron in the Mediterranean.

The Touro family represented perhaps the most noteworthy symbiosis of early Jewish and American fortunes. In 1758 young Isaac Touro arrived in Newport from Curacao to serve as chazzan —literally “cantor,” but better understood as a reader of services—to the local synagogue. One of his sons, Abraham, settled in New Orleans, where he built a large shipping business. Subsequently, Abraham Touro moved to Boston, opened a shipyard in New Bedford, and again won much financial success and social esteem. Upon his death in 1825, he left bequests to numerous Jewish, local, and state charities. Yet Abraham's generosity was far surpassed by that of his younger brother. Like Abraham, Judah Touro also established his fortune, as an importer, in New Orleans, but he remained in that city. His philanthropic contributions were substantial even during his lifetime. These included, besides a multitude of Jewish charities, the establishment of New Orleans's first free public library and its first public infirmary, later to win wide renown as the Touro Clinic. In 1840, when construction of the Bunker Hill monument in Boston was languishing for a shortage of funds, Touro added ten thousand dollars to an earlier donation contributed by his brother Abraham, enabling the project to be completed.

Judah Touro died in 1854. A bachelor, he left a fortune exceeding one million dollars. It was a generous estate, but hardly unprecedented. When Touro's will was probated, however, it was the range of his benefactions that evoked national attention and astonishment. Some $600,000 was left to a Gentile friend who had saved Touro's life in the Battle of New Orleans. The rest went to charity. The usual Jewish institutions were well remembered, including funds for the New Orleans and Newport synagogues and for the Society for Indigent Jews in Jerusalem. Touro also left funds to establish a Jewish hospital in New Orleans. But remembered, too, was a wide diversity of non-Jewish institutions, among them the New Orleans Almshouse Fund, Society for Relief of Orphans, St. Armas Asylum for Relief of Destitute Females and Children, New Orleans Female Orphan Asylum, St. Mary's Catholic Boys Asylum, Fireman's Charitable Association, Seamen's Home. Until then, nonsectarian generosity of this magnitude had not been recorded in the experience of American philanthropy. Little wonder that Judah Touro's will was described as the “will of the century.” It was plainly a testament of gratitude to his native land.

It evinced as well the extent of Jewish acculturation and acceptance by the mid-nineteenth century. Although Jews did not yet press for approbation, they were mixing easily with their neighbors. Aaron Lopez welcomed Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden of New York as a dinner guest in his home. The Levy-Franks clan of New York and Philadelphia entertained New York's governor and justices of the United States Supreme Court. When Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel congregation, still in desperate financial straits nearly a decade after the Revolution, appealed for help to “worthy citizens of every religious denomination,” Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, and William Bradford were among the contributors. In that same city four years earlier, on July 4, a gala Independence Day celebration had been mounted. Float after float moved through the streets. One of the floats symbolized religious freedom and was escorted by seventeen clergymen of different faiths. They formed a very “agreeable” part of the procession, noted Benjamin Rush. “The Rabbi of the Jews, locked in the arms of two ministers of the Gospel, was a most delightful sight. There could not have been a more happy emblem contrived, which opens all its power and offices alike, not only to every sect of Christians, but to worthy men of every religion.” The scene was not yet typical of every American city. But in Europe, as late as the turn of the century, it would have been unimaginable. HnRcwTmVk429wrFNGbwWHOAM8+kOCeqdhx53KH4AuL6/N4gJtpacVmI2qZTvWC54