A Consolidation of Political Status

I N A VIGOROUS capitalist republic, few Americans begrudged immigrant Jews their economic progress. The New York Commercial Advertiser editorialized in 1822:

Implicit even in a welcome this cordial, however, lay the patronizing allusion to the Christian religion, and to the underlying Christian nature of the nation itself. Evangelicals and millenarians never abandoned their conversionary obligation to the “neglected children of Israel.” Neither did politicians and jurists relinquish the effort to institutionalize Christianity in the public law of the realm. “I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville during the Jacksonian era, “... but I am sure they think it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions.”

Tocqueville was right. Some fifty years later, another foreign visitor, James Bryce, noted with interest that federal and state governments awarded Christianity near-official recognition. He cited the opening of congressional and state legislative sessions with prayers by Christian clergymen, Thanksgiving Day proclamations of a Christological nature, antiblasphemy laws. Evaluating church and state in America, Bryce observed: “Christianity is in fact understood to be, though not the legally established religion, yet the national religion.” Over the years, it became a widely held mythos that Christianity even was part of the common law. In 1820 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared that “Christianity is part of the Common Law of this state. It is not proclaimed by the commanding voice of any human superior, but expressed in the calm and mild accents of customary law.” This view was endorsed by Judge Peter Thatcher of Massachusetts and by former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story when Story became professor of law at Harvard. It was on the assumption of Christianity's enshrined status, too, that courts as well as “respectable” citizens throughout the nation endorsed Sunday blue laws and Bible readings and Christian hymns in public schools.

Whatever their private misgivings, Jewish immigrants rarely found this enshrinement unbearable. They nurtured bitter memories of authentic second-class citizenship in Europe, Blue laws and Christian hymns in public schools seemed a minor price to pay for living in a nation that extended them so many other precious freedoms. It was less the law, in any case, than the sheer openness of American society that allowed Jews their security and opportunity. Some Jews even were achieving recognition in the armed forces. During the Mexican War, Captain Jonas Phillips Levy, commander of the USS America , was appointed military governor of Vera Cruz. His cousin, Levy Charles Harby, a captain of marines, saw action in the War of 1812 and in the Seminole and Texas wars of the 1830s. Yet another cousin, Robert P. Noah, participated as an officer in the Mexican War. Jonas Levy's brother was Captain Uriah Phillips Levy, a fiery martinet who was in and out of trouble with his naval superiors, ostensibly for his harsh discipline, but more probably for his mercurial temper (he killed a fellow officer in a duel). During the assault on Chapultepec in the Mexican War, David Camden De Leon, the Jewish surgeon general, rallied the troops when the regimental commander was killed, and gained fame as the “Fighting Doctor.”

In politics, meanwhile, Jews continued to identify with the Democrats as full-heartedly during the Jacksonian era as in the Jeffersonian era. As Democrats, Samuel Judah sat in the Indiana legislature, Jacob Henry in the North Carolina legislature, Myers Moses and Chapman Levy in the South Carolina legislature. Four Jewish Democrats served at various times in the Georgia legislature. Mordecai Myers was a Democratic perennial in the New York state legislature, while Jews in New York City served as Democratic precinct and ward chairmen. Indeed, so active were Jews in New York politics during the 1840s and 1850s that Democratic party leaders there made a point of attending Jewish social and charitable events. It would not be long before aspiring Jews discerned an exploitable political advantage in their ancestry. A pioneer in this vocation was Mordecai Manuel Noah. Son of a Sephardic mother and a German-born Ashkenazi who had fought in the Revolutionary War, Noah was orphaned as a child and reared by his maternal grandparents in Charleston. Attending school later in Philadelphia, he served intermittently as an errand-running factotum for local Democratic politicians. In 1803, at the age of eighteen, he savored the first fruits of sycophancy when he was appointed a major in the Pennsylvania militia. Turning next to journalism, “Major Noah” tried his hand as a newspaper publisher, winning a respectable audience but failing to make the venture solvent.

Politics appeared a safer meal ticket. Accordingly, in 1810 Noah applied to the Madison administration for a consular appointment. In his letter to Secretary of State Robert Smith, the major piously suggested that his appointment would encourage other “members of the Hebrew Nation” to immigrate to the United States with their funds. Almost as an afterthought, Noah intimated that his coreligionists would know how to be “grateful for any testimony of the good opinion of their government.” To support his claim, he displayed letters of recommendation from prominent Jews of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. It cannot be determined which of these inducements registered on the administration, but in 1813 Noah was appointed consul to Tunis. In fact, Tunis was a challenging billet. The Berber city was a snake pit of Mediterranean piracy. Several Americans were held captive there. The challenge was Noah's meat. He spent the ensuing two years wheedling loans from various Berber potentates on the promise of United States government reimbursement, then using the funds to negotiate the hostages' ransom and release. Describing his “historic” achievement to Washington, Noah anticipated commendation.

Instead, he was fired. The letter from Secretary of State James Monroe noted that, at the time of Noah's appointment, the Department had not been informed of “the faith which you profess, [or that this faith] would prove a diplomatic obstacle in a Moslem community.” The explanation was disingenuous. Far from being unknown to the Madison administration, Noah's Jewishness had been the reason for his appointment. The government simply felt compromised by his lavish expenditures and inability to keep his mission secret. Noah in any case moved quickly to vent his indignation in a widely publicized letter to friends and political contacts. Almost immediately he won support from his credulous Jewish supporters. They added their own protests to his. The episode was embarrassing for President Madison, who was campaigning for re-election in 1816. At Madison's request, Secretary of State Monroe and Democratic party leaders were obliged to spend the better part of a year placating irate Jewish correspondents. The lesson was not lost on them. Neither was it lost on Noah. He returned to journalism for the while, as an editor of the New York National Advocate , a Democratic newspaper. But he was careful to maintain his Jewish ties. Prematurely stout and flaunting red muttonchop whiskers, the major became a familiar figure as an unofficial spokesman for Congregation Shearith Israel, a participant in Jewish philanthropic campaigns, defender of Jewish honor against real or fancied slurs. Diligently, too, he mailed off reprints of his articles and speeches to President Madison, to former President Thomas Jefferson, to the resentful Monroe (who privately alluded to Noah only as “the Jew”), to local Democratic officials. No one was allowed to forget that Noah was a Jewish “leader.”

In the late teens, finally, Noah hit upon a visionary scheme to enhance and exploit that “leadership.” It was to establish a Jewish “homeland” on American soil. The notion of bloc settlement was not unprecedented. In 1817 and 1818, various English, German, French, and Swedish groups had negotiated for autonomous status in the Midwest. Although none succeeded, unofficial ethnic enclaves of religion-national communities—of “Pennsylvania Dutch,” Swedish Lutherans, “Cajun” French—were hardly uncommon in the United States. Later yet, in the expansionist years after the War of 1812, several American Jews also adopted the notion. Possibly real estate speculation was a factor. Moses E. Levy proposed that Jews migrate collectively to Florida, where he owned extensive tracts. Samuel Myers of Norfolk suggested an even broader colonization in the frontier areas he himself was buying west of the Mississippi. Yet it needed Mordecai M. Noah to transcend these earlier designs. In 1820 he petitioned the New York legislature to sell him Grand Island, a 17,000-acre tract in the Niagara River, near the Canadian border. To be called “Ararat” (a fitting title for a modern Noah), the island would serve as a “colony for the Jews of the world.” The petition languished.

Accounts of the proposal, however, began to circulate in Germany, where Jews lately had undergone a series of antisemitic riots. The Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, a society devoted to scholarly Jewish research, discussed Noah's idea with some enthusiasm and in 1821 notified the major of his election as an honorary member. Noah's vanity was piqued. His interest in the Ararat project revived. In 1824, the New York legislature decided belatedly to sell off Grand Island. Hereupon, stirred to action, Noah persuaded a land agent, Samuel Leggett, to put up $17,000 on his behalf. With this sum, Noah was able to buy up 2,444 acres of the tract. Subsequently, he published an appeal to European Jews, entreating them to bring their capital with them, to invest heavily in Ararat. To Leggett, he confided his expectation of an “immense profit.”

In September 1825, the major set out for upstate New York to arrange dedication ceremonies. Grand Island itself was an inaccessible wasteland. Accordingly, Noah planned the event in nearby Buffalo, where he rented the city's largest public facility, St. Paul's Episcopal Church. The great day dawned on September 15. Cannoneers fired a rousing salute, and a band struck up a march as the procession of notables, among them the Seneca chief Red Jacket, departed the Masonic lodge. Leading the parade to St. Paul's was Noah himself, resplendent in a Richard III costume he had borrowed from the local Park Theater. On the church communion table lay the cornerstone for the Jewish community of Ararat, inscribed with the Hebrew Sh'ma . Here it was that Noah delivered his “Proclamation to the Jews”:

Judge Noah similarly proclaimed the obligation of all Diaspora Jews to aid any of their brethren who wished to settle in Ararat and to pay a head tax of three shekels to defray the expenses of the new Jewish government. By then, even the credulous Jüdischewissenschaftsverein had ceased to take Noah's extravaganza seriously. American Jews ridiculed his “folly and sacrilegious presumption.” Whig politicians gleefully mocked the project as a “mad, mobbing business,” a scheme “for swindling the wealthy Jews of Europe.” Grand Island in any case did not serve as the abode of a single Jew for a single day. In 1833 one Lewis F. Allen bought the entire island cheaply as timberland, and in 1852 it was incorporated as a town. Today, Grand Island houses about eighteen thousand people. The Ararat cornerstone resides in its town hall as a tourist attraction.

Yet the fiasco did Noah no permanent harm. If it did not provide him with a real estate killing, it added still further to his vague public image as a Jewish “leader.” He played the part to the hilt in his newspaper, answering questions from all quarters about Jewish religious practices, endlessly defending his people against contumely. Throughout the Jackson and Van Buren administrations, too, the Democratic party found it expedient to reward Noah with a succession of patronage jobs in New York: as customs collector, surveyor, sheriff. Whether holding court in his home at Broadway and Franklin Street, or strolling the town “flushed and puffing like another Falstaff,” Noah savored his eminence, graciously acknowledging the greetings of admirers. When he died in 1851, crowds lined the route of his funeral cortege. He had emerged as a prophet of sorts, after all. It was not of Jewish national regeneration, to be sure, but of Jewish political exploitation. In his careerism, Noah anticipated the Jewish title-seekers of a later century, who similarly learned to manipulate Jewish organizational eminence for American political contacts and appointments. pByS5fp3e86aGf3TmdDoAltcUd7pi9ozgSnT4ME8s+apTu7Xyc4FaPLO3eqDbyfZ