Swallowed in America

T HE J EWS ' PRINCIPAL area of vulnerability by then was neither economic nor political, but demographic. They still lacked “critical mass.” Throughout the eighteenth century, many more European Jews immigrated to the British and Dutch West Indies than to mainland North America. Even as late as 1830, the West Indies sustained a larger Jewish population than did the United States, perhaps six thousand to four thousand. Until then, not more than one hundred Jews entered the United States in any single year. Even within this modest presence, the Sephardic component continued to shrink. From the late 1600s on, virtually all Jewish immigrants were German and Polish Ashkenazim. The Sephardic “veterans” accordingly regarded this influx with mingled condescension and alarm. As in Europe and the Indies, their “aristocratic” sensibilities were offended by the Ashkenazim's putative aggressiveness and uncouthness. Ironically, there was very little of the “grandee” about any of the early Sephardim themselves. Most were descended from conversos , and none was related to the great Sephardic dynasties of Europe or the Ottoman Empire. Snobbery has always functioned as compensation for perceived loss of influence.

Thus, in the early eighteenth century, the Sephardim continued to marry largely among their own. Amelia Lazarus, née Tobias, had six brothers and sisters, and four of these married Hendrickses (who may also have been of part-Ashkenazic ancestry). One brother married a Hendricks first, then for his second wife chose a Tobias cousin. The Hendrickses produced a comparable pattern of intramural unions. Uriah Hendricks, whose first wife was a Gomez and whose second was a Lopez, sired ten children, all of whom married Gomezes. In the next generation, the thirteen children of Harmon Hendricks married, among others, two Tobias sisters, two Tobias brothers, a Gomez first cousin, and two Nathans. In the first American generation of Sephardic settlement, there were three Gomez-Hendricks marriages; in the next, four Hendricks-Tobias marriages and one Gomez-Nathan marriage. Meanwhile, Gomezes were marrying other Gomezes (and eventually displaying an ominous pattern of mental retardation). The complexity and fecundity of these family relationships are confirmed in Malcolm Stern's Americans of Jewish Descent Of twenty-five thousand individuals listed in the book, all are grouped under a little more than two hundred family trees.

Yet if Sephardic families in Europe could afford to preserve their limpieza de sangre , their ethnic “purity”, in America they were too few to sustain the luxury. Corresponding with her son, Abigail Franks noted the widespread opposition to a marriage between Rachel Levy and Isaac Mendes Seixas. The girl “being a Tedesco [the Sephardic term for Ashkenazi], the Portuguese [Sephardim] here were in a Violent Uproar about it [and the groom] did not invite any of them to ye wedding.” Nevertheless, sooner or later the veterans had to abandon their prejudices if their children were to marry within the Jewish fold at all. Well aware of their status as newcomers, the Central and East Europeans at least showed proper deference to the older, Iberian tradition. Gratefully they accepted membership in Sephardic congregations and Sephardic ritual. Thus, the dynamic Gratz and Sheftal families, both of German-Polish extraction, took pains to affiliate with Sephardic synagogues. Arriving in New York from Germany at the end of the seventeenth century, the brothers Moses and Samuel Levy married into Sephardic families and became leaders in the Shearith Israel congregation. The inscription on Moses's tomb was in Portuguese as well as in Hebrew. When Isaac M. Wise, the eminent leader of Reform Judaism in the latter nineteenth century, came to New York in 1846, he found the oldest living member of Shearith Israel to be a Polish Jew.

During the first century and a half of Jewish settlement in America, in truth, hardly any congregation could sustain itself even financially without the cooperation of Jews of all backgrounds. In 1718, preparing at last to build their first synagogue, the elders of Shearith Israel appealed for assistance to the Bevis Marks “mother” congregation in London, as well as to synagogues in the West Indies. Two decades later, the Jews of Newport applied to Shearith Israel. In 1824 the Hebrew Congregation of Cincinnati appealed to Charleston Jewry for help in building a synagogue, for “we have always performed all in our power to promote Judaism and for the last four or five years, we have congregated where a few years before nothing was heard but the howling of wild beasts, and the more hideous cry of savage men.” In all cases, that help was forthcoming. The Jews took care of their own. Indeed, there was no alternative to dependence on voluntarism. The state-enforced Jewish kehillah—the official Jewish community—of Europe did not exist in the New World. Even for Christians, the structure of autonomous congregations had become the norm in colonial America. All religious communities eventually depended on the voluntary allegiance of their members.

Nevertheless, if a Jew wished the collegiality and comfort of his own people, there was no choice but acceptance of congregational discipline. In synagogue and church alike, conformity was imposed through group pressure, public opinion, or, in extreme cases, denial of access to religious marriage and burial. Thus, Shearith Israel decreed that persons refusing to support the congregation “shall not be considered in publick or in private as Jeus [Jews] during life and be regarded and treated in the same manner when dead.” Intermittently in the eighteenth century, a system of congregational fines was imposed, ranging from Rodeph Shalom's (Philadelphia) twenty-five-cent penalty on members failing to attend Sabbath services to Shearith Israel's five-pound assessment on members discovered working on the Sabbath. In the end, these fines proved unenforceable. Moral pressure remained the principal sanction. It was a powerful one during these early years, when congregation was synonymous with community. Burial, marriage, and the provision of kosher food were among the congregation's most important functions. So was charity. Indeed, more than 10 percent of Shearith Israel's income went for relief. The poor were respectable people, after all, usually widows. In Newport, an impoverished widow was carried on the synagogue charity rolls from 1770 until her death in 1787. Needy Jewish wayfarers were boarded at the congregation's expense. One such beneficiary was David Hays, later to become the wealthiest Jew in America. He and his wife were sustained by Shearith Israel for two years. In the end, however, the decisive benefit of synagogue membership was psychological. It offered protection from anomie in a vast and alien land, a world far distant from one's kinsmen and ancestral surroundings.

The dread of anomie was compounded by that of Christian proselytization. Historians have made much of the parallels the New England Puritans drew between themselves and the ancient Hebrews, the equation of their commonwealth with a new Canaan or a new Jerusalem. As late as 1787, students at Harvard were obliged to study Hebrew. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale (and friend of Newport's Aaron Lopez), delivered his commencement greetings in Hebrew. When the colonists revolted against the British, their enemies became “Philistines,” and George III “Rehoboam” or “Pharaoh.” The imagery of ancient Israel was much in evidence during the Continental Congress in 1777. Benjamin Franklin proposed for the new Confederation's great seal the figure of a heroic Moses lifting his wand to divide the Red Sea. But these affinities notwithstanding, fundamentalist Protestantism did not translate its devotion to the Old Testament into benevolence toward contemporary Jews. Instead, more than a few Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and others took literally the assumption that the millennium would come only when the Jews had been “called”—that is, converted. In 1696 Cotton Mather confided to his diary a prayer “for the conversion of the Jewish nation, and for my own having the happiness ... to baptize a Jew, that should by my ministry be brought home unto the Lord.” Indeed, for the devout, proselytization of the Jews became something of a social crusade in the eighteenth century, and even afterward.

The conversion of Judah Monis accordingly was a sweet moment for these millenarians. Born in Italy, a descendant of Portuguese marranos, Monis reached New York in 1715 via Amsterdam and Jamaica. Eventually he settled in Boston. Although a merchant, he fascinated local ministers with his rich knowledge of the Hebrew language and Jewish lore. It was in deference to this erudition, moreover, that Harvard College in 1720 awarded Monis a Master of Arts degree. Two years later, exposed to the intensive proselytization of his friends Increase Mather and John Leverett, Monis embraced Christianity. Possibly careerism influenced his decision, for afterward he was able to accept an instructorship in Hebrew at Harvard. The ceremony of his baptism was public, taking place in College Hall under the joyous direction of Increase Mather. Monis then preached his own “discourse,” confirming his acceptance of Jesus as Messiah. The proselytizing impulse continued well into the next century. One of its champions in the early 1800s was Hannah Adams, a distant cousin of the second president. For this frail, gentle little woman, the Jews had long held a special fascination. Of her many books on religion, the two-volume History of the Jews was her crowning achievement. Yet as a millenarian, Hannah Adams was endlessly “perplexed that the race should persist in rejecting the Messiah.” In 1816, to rectify the incongruity, she founded the “Female Society ... for promoting Christianity among the Jews.” Ultimately, twenty affiliated branches were registered in New York alone, and the movement's male supporters included John Quincy Adams and Governor De Witt Clinton. The society had counterparts within all the principal denominations. Their efforts to win converts among the Jews persisted almost to the eve of the Civil War.

There were few Judah Monises in early American Jewish history. There did not have to be. Assimilation or unconscious defection proved more effective. Few in number, the Jews subsisted without rabbinical leadership. Not a single ordained rabbi came to America during the colonial and early Federal periods. In 1685 a layman, Saul Pardo, arrived in New York to serve Shearith Israel as chazzan —cantor-minister. Pardo set a precedent for the New World by adopting the title “Reverend.” His religious duties did not interfere with his career as a merchant. Conversely, his lack of ordination did not deter him from presiding over marriages and funerals; under Jewish law, such functions did not require ordination. Pardo and subsequent chazzanim also doubled as kosher butchers and ritual circumcisers. Of these early “reverends,” the first to be native-born was Gershom Mendes Seixas, who assumed the ministry of Shearith Israel in 1768. Seixas's remuneration was an intermittent pittance, often simply gratuities from his congregants. It was uncertain that he deserved more. Years passed before Mendes Seixas mastered even the rudiments of Jewish ritual practice.

In truth, the absence of trained rabbis all but aborted the cultural life of early American Jewry. It was the chazzan who provided religious “education,” a program of studies that included little more than the fundamentals of the synagogue service and the Jewish ritual calendar. Boys approaching their bar mitzvah received a minimal supplementary instruction in Hebrew and Bible. Rarely did synagogues follow the Puritan tradition of combining secular and religious education in the same school. Jewish children acquired their “three Rs” elsewhere, from tutors or in private schools. Rather, early Jewish cohesion depended on other, less tangible factors. Family ties remained strong and extended into the American wilderness. Relatives cared for one another, taking in newly arrived cousins and distant kinsmen. Yet here, too, the struggle to maintain group identity became increasingly difficult. With immigration minimal even in the early years of American independence, the number of Jewish spouses—essentially of Jewish women—was always limited. When available, wives normally were devoted helpmates in maintaining Jewish tradition, and they bore children with extraordinary fortitude. Issue of twelve or fifteen offspring was not unknown. But there were never enough of these brides. Intermarriage followed all but inevitably.

Characteristic was the pattern found in the Mordecai family. Abraham Mordecai was a Revolutionary War soldier who became an Indian trader in Georgia. A niece, Caroline Mordecai, bore a daughter who later married one Achille Plunkett. Mordecai's nephew, Moses, a North Carolinian, married Margaret Lane. When Margaret died, Moses's second wife was Ann Willis. Still another Moses Mordecai, a German-born merchant of Philadelphia, married Elizabeth Whitlock, who was converted and became an observant Jew. This was one of the rare occasions when intermarriage added to the Jewish flock. But if a majority of Christian women did not convert, Jewish men, alone and companionless in the wilderness, continued to marry them on any terms and under any circumstances. With hardly an exception, their children were lost to the Jewish people.

In the end, it was the sheer weight of a majority culture that took its toll. During the Revolutionary War a Hessian soldier, Conrad Döhla, familiar with traditional Jews in his native Germany, expressed astonishment that the Jews he encountered in New York were beardless “in the manner of American Gentiles,” that all avenues of life seemed open to Jews, that many no longer hesitated to eat pork or to consort with and marry Gentiles. During the 1790s, Rebecca Samuel, a young Jew of Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to her parents in Hamburg:

Colonial America was a land, as Haym Salomon once described it in a letter to an uncle in England, of “ vinig yiddishkeit ”—little Jewishness.

By the time of the Revolution, the ancestral religion had become a tradition of sentimental loyalty and of increasingly benign neglect. Years later, in the 1840s, Isaac M. Wise could ask rhetorically of the earlier American Jewish community: “How has it happened that, of all the Jews who emigrated to these shores between 1620 [ sic ] and 1829, there were not two hundred families left that belonged to congregations, while the majority had disappeared among the masses, traces of them being clearly recognizable in hundreds of Christian families?” The earliest Jewish settlement, particularly its Sephardic vanguard, had indeed achieved security in the New World, even had established a precedent in freedom for succeeding waves of immigrants. Yet it was one of the poignant ironies of Jewish history that its own pioneering footprints by then had all but vanished into the haze of folklore. XsMSHCT2vCDmedTMjQbUYgE8YXvrmUz3IFbvFOu9EEFylHeQHAPCsFVT+/WxxC02