The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

The history of the Jewish people in America is dated by common agreement to early September 1654, when a small French vessel arrived in the harbor of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, carrying among its passengers twenty-three Jewish men, women, and children who were fleeing from Brazil. They were primarily Sephardic, tracing their origins to ancestors who had resided on the Iberian peninsula, but there may also have been several Ashkenazim from central and eastern Europe.¹

The quest for the origins of a Jewish presence in colonial America leads back to Holland in the late 1500s, when Jews began to leave Portugal to resettle in Amsterdam. These migrants were New Christians, people whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity as much as a century before, beginning in the year 1497, in order to be permitted to remain in Portugal. Many of the forced converts secretly adhered to Judaism, much as in Spain, where a large number of New Christians, the Marranos, covertly remained loyal to Judaism. As in Spain, the papacy authorized an Inquisition for Portugal to ferret out all heresy, especially the heresy of clandestine adherence to Judaism. Life for New Christians in Portugal was fraught therefore with tension and anxiety because of the ever looming possibility that one could be denounced to the Inquisition as an underground Jew, with dire consequences and penalties that followed if one were found guilty.²

The perils of such an existence increased dramatically for the New Christian population in the 1580s, for Portugal and Spain were joined under a single monarchy at that juncture, and they remained united for several decades. With unification under one crown, the aggressiveness of the Inquisition in Portugal increased, thanks to the influence of the Spanish Inquisition. New Christians who resided in Portugal consequently began to emigrate to Holland in the 1590s, finding a large measure of safety and toleration in Amsterdam, although it would take them almost half a century to receive the right to construct synagogues and thereby worship in public. Holland made sense as a destination, for the Dutch were struggling to win their independence from Spain—and Portugal was now a part of Spain. Accordingly, New Christians who sought to escape from an Inquisition that had become more intent upon unearthing heresy sought haven in the emerging nation that was the enemy of the combined crown of the two Iberian nations.

Once safely in Amsterdam, many of the New Christians began to practice Judaism openly. Some outwardly maintained their Christian identities for purposes of trade with commercial correspondents in Portugal and Spain while, at the same time, quietly reverting to Judaism. A flourishing Jewish community developed by the middle of the 1600s in the Netherlands; by mid-century Dutch Jews numbered two or three thousand, and Amsterdam Jewry created a major center of Jewish life, referred to by contemporaries as the Dutch Jerusalem.³

Its emergence and its significance made the Amsterdam Jewish community a destination not only for refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition but also from the Spanish Inquisition, so that New Christian emigration from the two countries to Holland during the 1600s reflected the cyclical campaigns that both Inquisitions periodically unleashed. In addition, by the middle of the 1600s Amsterdam began to attract Ashkenazic Jews, whether from the German states or Poland. Economic discrimination in the German states, as well as limits upon the number of Jews who could reside in many of them, drove some from central Europe. Farther to the east, the widespread attacks upon Jewish communities that began in 1648 under the leadership of Chmielnicki propelled still more to the west.⁴

At the same time that a dynamic Jewish community was developing in Holland during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch embarked upon a program of overseas expansion. Simultaneously with their struggle for independence, they sought to become a commercially powerful nation, and to that end the Netherlanders challenged the Portuguese in both hemispheres. Though a small nation, Portugal had established a mighty empire in both halves of the globe, with colonies in Africa, India, the East Indies, and Brazil and lucrative trading connections between the mother country and the colonies. The small, emerging nation of the Netherlands daringly confronted the Portuguese on the high seas and in their colonies. A significant portion of the growing Jewish community in Holland chose to affiliate with their new homeland’s ambitious effort against a nation they had their own reasons to oppose. Doing so thereby put them on the road that ultimately led a handful to New Amsterdam in 1654.

As part of Holland’s program of expansion during the 1620s, the Dutch West Indies Company, a private stock corporation, established the colony of New Netherland along the Hudson River, stretching from Manhattan Island northward beyond the modern city of Albany. The Dutch West Indies Company’s goals included not only earning profits and paying dividends to its shareholders but also serving as the engine of Holland’s design to supplant the Portuguese in the Western hemisphere. Accordingly, at about the same time in 1624, it launched an expedition to seize Brazil, though it failed to capture that huge, profitable, sugar-producing colony. The Company tried again in 1630, this time succeeding, with Jewish soldiers, including one with the rank of colonel, among the personnel in its hired army. The Dutch remained in Brazil for the next twenty-four years until 1654, when the Portuguese successfully counterattacked and retook the colony.

During the period of Dutch West India Company rule in Brazil, Jewish settlers from Amsterdam established a sizable presence in the colony; by 1645 approximately 1,450 Jewish inhabitants resided in northeastern Brazil. Inasmuch as the Jewish population of Holland around 1650 was estimated at 2,000 or 3,000 individuals, the number of Dutch Jews who chose to migrate to Brazil represented a substantial proportion of Dutch Jewry. Once established in Brazil, the Jewish population participated in a wide array of economic enterprises ranging from artisan crafts to overseas trade and, in a few instances, to the ownership of sugar plantations. Their involvement in the sugar industry, however, largely took the form of purchasing and otherwise handling sugar for export; Jewish merchants, in other words, served as brokers and middlemen, thereby playing a significant role in what was Brazil’s most important commodity. Furthermore, Brazil’s Jewish inhabitants established two synagogues and employed a haham (the Sephardic term for rabbi) from Amsterdam, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, who was thus the first Jewish religious authority in the New World.⁵

All this collapsed between 1645 and 1654. In the mid-1640s, Brazil’s Portuguese inhabitants launched a brutal guerrilla war against their Dutch occupiers. It quickly took its toll on the Jewish population, primarily by inducing great unease, for, if the Portuguese staged a comeback, all Jews would be required to leave what would once again become part of the Portuguese realm. Worse, any who had originally been New Christians who had emigrated to Holland and then to Brazil would be targets for the Inquisition, which would of course be reintroduced in the wake of a Portuguese victory. The population of approximately 1,450 consequently began to decline, and by 1654 only 600 or so remained. In that year an overseas expedition launched by Portugal and aided by Portuguese guerrilla forces in Brazil successfully recaptured the colony, forcing the Dutch West India Company to relinquish its presence there. All Dutch settlers, including the Jews among them, were given three months to depart.⁶

Most of Brazil’s Jews returned to Amsterdam, but some decided to head instead for the British colony of Barbados and the French colony of Martinique, logical destinations because of their extensive sugar cultivation, a commodity with which Brazilian Jews had developed considerable expertise.⁷ But for reasons that remain unknown, twenty-three of them set sail for New Netherland, where they disembarked at New Amsterdam in time to observe Rosh Hashana (the Jewish new year festival).

Why the small band chose New Amsterdam is problematic. Economically, New Netherland was hardly a flourishing place. The climate, of course, precluded sugar production. Nor were there many attractions for merchants who wished to trade internationally, the ambition that most characterized Jews who settled in the American colonies. Population growth during New Netherland’s first quarter century was meager, limiting prospects for shopkeepers and artisans at the local level. After 1640 four merchant houses in Amsterdam dominated trade between Holland and New Netherland, none of which was Jewish. This, alone, hampered opportunities for Jewish merchants, for membership in a transatlantic ethnic or religious network was crucial to success in international commerce. For that matter, the hold exerted by the four non-Jewish Amsterdam houses impeded even non-Jewish merchants who resided in the colony.⁸

The reasons a small number of the Brazilian refugees headed for New Amsterdam must remain speculative; contemporary explanations for this poor choice have never come to light. An answer may lie, though, in a remarkable pattern of activity that existed among Dutch Sephardic Jews during the 1650s. In a burst of enterprise that commenced in 1651, they demonstrated an interest in colonization and settlement in the New World in many locations other than Brazil. At Curaçao they made several efforts during the decade to establish a colony, at length succeeding in 1659. In 1654, as already indicated, some of the Jews in Brazil headed for Barbados and Martinique. In 1657 Jewish settlers established a colony on the Wild Coast, a region along the Atlantic Ocean north of Brazil. A year later, around fifteen Jewish families settled in Newport, Rhode Island, emigrating there either from Curaçao or Barbados, perhaps even from Holland. In 1659, David Nassy, who had led earlier colonizing efforts in Curaçao and at the Wild Coast, established a colony at Cayenne, an island in the Atlantic near the latter. He did so with 150 Jews from Livorno, Italy. Finally, when the French conquered Cayenne in 1664, he led his Jewish colonists to the mainland, where they successfully settled in Suriname, or Dutch Guiana. This remarkable record of Dutch Jewish overseas activity can even be said to have included the effort launched by the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1655 for the right of Jews to settle in England, an undertaking that came to fruition a year later when the British government quietly assented, permitting Jews to settle in Britain for the first time in 365 years.⁹

When placed in the context of this extraordinary record of activity, the decision by the small group of Jewish exiles from Brazil to head for an otherwise unpromising New Amsterdam appears credible. New Netherland was yet one more colonial outpost for exploration by a Jewish population that was expressing avid interest in colonial projects. In that context, New Amsterdam made as much sense as the recurrent interest during the 1650s in Curaçao, a hot, barren island with little in the way of natural resources, save for its proximity to the coast of South America and its consequent potential as a trading post through which goods could be shipped to and from the Spanish Empire.

The twenty-three refugees who arrived in New Amsterdam encountered two Jewish merchants who had arrived only several weeks before. Perhaps other Jewish traders from the Netherlands had previously visited the colony, but, in contrast to transient merchants, the Brazilians gave every indication they intended to stay. They did so by resisting the efforts of the colony’s hostile leader, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, to deport them. Joined by several other Jewish settlers who perhaps came directly from Amsterdam, the twenty-three appealed over Stuyvesant’s head to the Dutch West India Company’s officers, going through the small community of the Company’s Jewish stockholders in Amsterdam. In response, Company officials ordered Stuyvesant to allow them to remain, for new settlers, they explained, were what colonies needed, and these newcomers, moreover, had risked their lives and fortunes in Brazil for the Company’s benefit. Although forced to permit them to stay, Stuyvesant continued to place every obstacle he could in their path, forcing the Jewish colonists to appeal again and again to Amsterdam. Over the course of the next three years, they won the right to trade at any location in the colony, to purchase homes, to serve in the militia instead of being forced to pay a tax, and at last, in 1657, to enjoy the same civic rights that Jews exercised in Amsterdam.¹⁰

Despite their political achievements in New Amsterdam, nearly every one of its Jewish inhabitants subsequently left not long after the victory in 1657. Virtually all were gone before Britain’s surprise attack and conquest of the colony in 1664 (renaming it New York), when only one or two Jews are known to have remained.¹¹ Apparently New Amsterdam proved too unpromising, but not because of Stuyvesant’s attempts to impose restrictions upon the Jewish settlers; he had been forced repeatedly by the Company to give way. Instead, New Amsterdam’s economic limitations seem more likely to have been the cause. Indeed, other Jews coming to North America in the 1650s went instead to Newport, Rhode Island. As mentioned previously, around fifteen families arrived there in 1658. This choice has often been attributed to Rhode Island’s embrace of religious toleration; and perhaps this did play a role in the settlers’ decision. On the other hand, the Dutch West India Company had rebuffed all of Stuyvesant’s obstructionism. Choosing to settle in Newport in preference to New Amsterdam may well have had as much to do with New Amsterdam’s lack of economic opportunity for Jewish traders as with Rhode Island’s policy of tolerating Jews, along with Protestants of all stripes.

Almost nothing is known of Newport’s mid-seventeenth-century Jewish settlers, and in fact one authority dates their first arrival not to 1658 but to the mid-1670s, when the Jews there purchased land for a cemetery in 1677.¹² (Significantly, Jewish immigrants at that date still avoided New York.) As was true wherever they settled in colonial America, Rhode Island’s Jewish settlers turned to transatlantic commerce, as may be inferred by two prosecutions of Jewish merchants in the mid-1680s for suspected violations of England’s Navigation Acts. In the early 1690s the Jewish population may have grown with the arrival of approximately ninety individuals from Curaçao. But thereafter, until the 1740s, traces of a Jewish presence in Newport are slim, suggesting that whatever Jewish community existed in Rhode Island at the end of the seventeenth century largely disappeared until the middle of the eighteenth.¹³

In New York, however, a new Jewish community began to form during the 1680s, and this time it was a permanent one; it is to this decade, therefore, that the beginnings of American Jewish history can be dated unequivocally. Jewish settlers were not attracted to New York after the English seized it in their sudden attack in 1664, despite the fact that Britain established religious toleration there following the conquest. When they contemplated settling in Britain’s overseas possessions during the 1660s and 1670s, Jews preferred Barbados and Jamaica in the Caribbean.¹⁴ Both specialized in plantation agriculture and therefore did not grow their own food supplies or produce manufactured goods, depending instead upon imports from North America for the former, England for the latter. Hence, a small number of Jews made their way to New York by the beginning of the 1680s, no doubt because of the commerce between it and the two important Caribbean islands. That a new Jewish community was indeed establishing itself in New York is evident from the purchase of land in 1682 for a cemetery. By 1700 the town’s Jewish population stood at between 100 and 150 individuals, out of a total population of 5,000. At length in 1728 New York’s Jews were sufficient in number and resources to organize a congregation and to construct a synagogue, the first on the North American mainland.¹⁵

Shortly after the New Yorkers organized their community, a second permanent Jewish settlement appeared in Savannah, Georgia. The colony was established in 1732 to provide a refuge for impoverished debtors, who otherwise would have been incarcerated in prison to work off what they owed their creditors. The Sephardic community in London was at that juncture faced by an influx of New Christians fleeing from the Portuguese Inquisition, and it found its resources stretched thin. Its leaders received permission to send Jewish settlers to the newly established colony, and in 1733 they sent over forty-two settlers to Savannah.¹⁶

Unfortunately, the newcomers soon quarreled, for they were split between Sephardim (thirty-four in number) and Ashkenzim. They may have actually established a synagogue in 1735, but they soon separated, much in keeping with the conflict that usually characterized relations between these two branches of the Jewish people wherever they encountered one another.¹⁷ Five years later, most of the Sephardic population left the colony when Britain and Spain found themselves once again at war; the prospect of a Spanish victory did not bode well for Jews. Only three Jewish families remained in Savannah, and while others later settled there in the 1760s, the number remained minute, with as few as six families by the early 1770s. Despite an effort in 1774 to meet as a congregation in a private house, the Jewish population was unable to organize a community until the 1790s and did not construct a synagogue until 1820.¹⁸

The departure of Savannah’s Sephardic Jews contributed to the formation of a new Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina. Jews had been present at that location before, for as many as fifteen Jewish men are known to have appeared in Charleston between 1697 and 1740, attracted no doubt by the opportunities for Atlantic commerce that it afforded. By mid-century the Jewish population there was able to form a congregation as well as to establish a cemetery. Charleston proved attractive as a destination; by the 1790s its Jewish population began to exceed New York’s, and it was able to maintain its lead until 1820.¹⁹

Jews also began to settle in Philadelphia and again at Newport by the middle of the eighteenth century, where the possibilities for Atlantic commerce proved the attraction, as they had in New York and Charleston. Settlement in Philadelphia began with the sons of two New York merchant families, in 1737 and 1738, who migrated there so that they could establish branches of their families’ businesses. Other Jewish settlers soon appeared in Philadelphia thanks to its flourishing port, which funneled large numbers of immigrants from Northern Ireland and the German states into the American interior and great quantities of the hinterland’s produce abroad. There may have been as many as a hundred Jews in the town by the eve of the American Revolution. The Jewish presence in Philadelphia soared during the Revolution, for a majority of the Jews of New York, Charleston, and Savannah fled there when the British captured those cities and remained for the duration of the struggle. The influx enabled the Philadelphians to construct their first synagogue in 1782.²⁰

Newport’s new Jewish community formed during the 1740, and by the late 1750s it was feasible for it to erect what is the oldest synagogue building in the United States. Newport’s evolution as a port is what drew Jewish settlers, for the town’s commercial reach had expanded since the end of the 1600s from trade along the coasts of North America to extensive traffic with England, the Caribbean, and Africa. Jewish merchants began to settle in Newport by 1746, and by the eve of the Revolution there may have been as many as twenty-two Jewish families there. The settlers included Aaron Lopez, a refugee from the Portuguese Inquisition who arrived at Newport in the early 1750s, where he began to practice Judaism publicly and where he proceeded to establish a commercial empire that spanned the Atlantic trading world. Lopez grew to become one of Newport’s most prosperous inhabitants, although he lost his fortune with the outbreak of the Revolution. Indeed, Newport as a whole declined as a result of the conflict and ultimately sank into obscurity as a commercial center. By 1800, therefore, Newport disappeared as a center of Jewish settlement in early America.²¹

While Newport faded away, new Jewish communities arose in Baltimore and Richmond during the late 1700s and early 1800s, so that by 1820 there were six centers of Jewish life in the early United States, five of them seaports (New York, Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore).²² Small numbers of Jews were also to be found during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in locations that did not function as ports, ranging from eastern Long Island and Westchester County in New York, to New Jersey and Lancaster in Pennsylvania.²³ In all, the Jewish population of early America comprised a minute part of the entire American population, amounting in 1790 to between 1,300 and 1,500 in a total population that approached 4 million. In 1820 there were between 2,650 and 2,750 Jewish inhabitants, a mere three one-hundredths of 1 percent of the nation’s entire population.²⁴

Most Jews who established themselves in early America were of Ashkenazic descent, despite the fact that the period between 1654 and 1820 is routinely known as the Sephardic era in American Jewish history. It carries this name because it was the Sephardic ritual that everywhere governed the community’s religious life. Judaism was first introduced in North America in 1654 by refugees from Brazil who were almost all of Sephardic origin; the majority of the Newport community established in 1658 was undoubtedly Sephardic; and the new Jewish community in New York in the early 1680s was largely Sephardic. According to an important principle of traditional Jewish religious law, the custom established in a place becomes the law of that place, so long as it conforms to established traditional Jewish law. Hence, the Sephardic rite as the one that was originally established in the colonies remained the norm, even after Ashkenazic immigrants had become the majority, a position they achieved by 1720 and maintained for the next century.²⁵

Whether Sephardic or Ashkenazic, Jewish immigrants between 1654 and 1820 came for the most part from London and Amsterdam. Even if born in Spain or Portugal or in central or eastern Europe, they generally went first to England or the Netherlands, only to relocate to the American colonies. For all the attractions of London and Amsterdam—“the great city of Amsterdam . . . [and] a very populous city, more highly praised and more glorious than all others, London,” as the hazan of New York’s community reminisced in 1759²⁶—the Jewish communities in both localities were afflicted by a considerable amount of poverty among their members. To be sure, wealthy Jewish merchants were present in the two cities, but they were comparatively few in number. Much larger in number were the impoverished eastern and central European Jews called beteljuden (beggar Jews), who often subsisted by selling rags and castoff clothes. From Portugal and Spain émigrés fleeing increased levels of inquisitional activity arrived periodically, draining community resources. In Amsterdam the number of families requiring poor relief between 1725 and 1750 rose from 450 to more than 750, but contributors in the Sephardic congregation fell from almost 630 to 610. In London it was the prevalence of poverty that impelled the Sephardic leadership to send both Sephardim and Ashkenazim to Georgia and later to examine a similar plan to send another contingent of the poor to Charleston.

At the same time that poverty among the Jews of London and Amsterdam grew and contributed to settlement in the colonies, some among the well-to-do Jewish merchants of London and Amsterdam began to disengage from the Jewish community—and, by implication, from a sense of religious obligation for the less fortunate. In London’s case some of the wealthy either converted to Christianity or took Christian spouses, thereby ultimately distancing themselves from the Jewish community and weakening the ability of communal institutions to extend assistance to those at the lower end of the Jewish social order. In Amsterdam the problem had different origins. Well-to-do Sephardic Jews in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, as one historian has argued, exhibited less economic initiative and creativity than in previous eras. Though they were still people of means, “stagnation and loss of dynamism were unmistakable . . . [and] the picture was one of slow eclipse.” Ultimately, therefore, the community’s ability to care for its growing poor population diminished.²⁷

On the other hand, not all Jews who left Amsterdam and London for North America were impoverished. Some came from prosperous merchant families, which, while not of immense wealth, enjoyed comfortable circumstances. In these cases the impulse to migrate to the colonies arose from an elemental condition of commercial life in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Atlantic trading orbit, namely, the fact that a great deal of commerce was conducted within international networks that were religious and ethnic in origin. French Huguenots relied on other French Huguenots, Quakers traded with Quakers, and Jewish merchants did business with other Jewish merchants. Furthermore, religious and ethnic networks were even more solidly established when they encompassed family connections. Accordingly, Jewish merchants in London and Amsterdam sent brothers, sons, uncles, and cousins abroad to serve as commercial representatives in ports around the Atlantic basin. Rather, therefore, than poverty as the sole driving force, a significant number of the Jews who settled in early America did so in order to establish commercial outposts for their families’ enterprises.

Sephardic and Ashkenazic merchants in the American colonies dealt in a wide array of merchandise: sugar from the Caribbean, wine from the Canary Islands and Madeira, slaves from Africa and the Caribbean,²⁸ English manufactured goods like guns, wallpaper, carriages, musical instruments, tools and other hardware, and fine clothing, as well as the commodities that the American colonies exported to Europe and the Caribbean, such as furs, wood staves, planks, barrels, wheat, rice, indigo, naval stores, whale oil candles, and fish. In other words, they dealt readily with any and all of the products that were exported and imported throughout the length and breadth of the Atlantic world, for this was an era in which businessmen did not specialize. In this respect the Jewish merchants of eighteenth-century America resembled their non-Jewish counterparts, among whom they resided and worked and with whom they often formed successful partnerships, for the early American environment was tolerant of and welcoming toward its Jewish inhabitants. Antisemitism did not throw up the barriers that it did in contemporary Europe, where legal restrictions impeded Jewish mercantile and financial enterprise in many jurisdictions. To the contrary: rather than economic restrictions, Jews in the American colonies enjoyed the same access to economic opportunity as their non-Jewish counterparts.

Not all Jewish immigrants could immediately become merchants who participated in the Atlantic export and import trade. One might begin as a shopkeeper rather than a merchant, but the aspiration was always to be known as the latter. That the transition could be made was apparent in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a center for the exchange of furs and wheat from the interior in return for manufactured goods from England. Jews there (and non-Jews, too) who were listed as shopkeepers around 1760 succeeded over the course of the next two decades to the point where they could be listed as merchants. In Charleston Joseph Tobias described himself a “shopkeeper” in newspaper advertisements in the late 1730s, but by 1743 he had become a “merchant.” Similarly, Isaac Da Costa of Charleston, known as a shopkeeper in 1751, was called a merchant by 1759. To underscore the preferability of being able to identify oneself as a merchant, members of the Jewish community of New York made certain to call themselves that in their wills. The authors of nineteen of the twenty-three wills written by Jewish men that were filed in probate between 1704 and 1774 used the term. Some also identified the Jewish executors and witnesses of their wills as merchants—but, curiously, not the non-Jewish friends whom they designated.²⁹

Many important aspects of the lives of early America’s Jews derived directly from their involvement in transatlantic commerce, beginning with settlement primarily in the seaport communities of New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and Baltimore. So, too, did their remarkable proclivity for travel, particularly during the eighteenth century. Although they were linked in trading networks based upon religion and family, personal familiarity bestowed even greater advantages. Accordingly, they traveled frequently and widely among North America’s ports, the Caribbean, the dangers of travel on the high seas notwithstanding. Their journeys provided knowledge of market conditions abroad, familiarity with the products of a variety of lands, and, probably above all else, personal contact with their commercial counterparts in distant ports.³⁰ An impending journey logically became the occasion to write or update one’s will. As one New Yorker explained in his will in 1725, “the Dangers of the Sea And the Uncertainty of this Mortal Life” impelled him to draw it up on the eve of his departure for Jamaica. Four years later, another invoked “the danger & hazards unto which I am Likely to be Exposed,” prior to sailing for the Caribbean. A third, bound for England in 1743, explained that, “Considering the Dangers of the Seas,” the time had come to write his last will and testament.³¹

Mercantile aspirations also had a profound effect on family life, and this in at least two decisive ways. First, it broke up families because of the need for commercial representatives in other locations. Just as a merchant family in England would send a son to New York as its commercial representative, that same son eventually would send one or more of his offspring out into the world to act as his commercial representative. That, in fact, was the origin of the permanent Jewish presence in Philadelphia during the 1730s mentioned before. More poignantly, families would send their children to settle in the Caribbean or in England, often never to see them again.

Second, the centrality of personal connections to commerce extended to marriage. By joining families that resided in distant locations around the Atlantic, marriage solidified commercial networks. Again, therefore, parents sent off a son or daughter to marry in a distant port, never to see him or her again. This practice served, of course, to perpetuate Judaism by preventing intermarriage, but its commercially advantageous side also played a vital part in these significant life decisions.³²

The disruptive effects upon the family of the practices necessary for success in Atlantic commerce was a fact of life that deeply pained at least one Jewish woman in early America, Abigail Franks, née Levy. Abigail Levy married Jacob Franks, one of the New York Jewish community’s most prosperous Ashkenzic member during the first half of the 1700s. Jacob Franks had come to New York early in the 1700s as the commercial representative of his merchant family in London. In New York he prospered, married Abigail, daughter of another of the town’s Jewish merchants, and the two proceeded to raise a large family. At the beginning of the 1740s, Jacob sent two of their sons to Philadelphia to serve as the family’s commercial representatives there, but he also sent a third son, Naphtali, back to London, there to rejoin the original merchant family. Abigail, suspecting that she would never see Naphtali again, corresponded with him regularly for the remainder of her life, and in 1741 she wrote, in a passage that reflected the price the early American Jewish family paid for its mercantile aspirations,

The overseas networks to which they belonged enveloped the Jews of early America in a web of relationships and practices that nurtured their capacity to maintain Judaism in the English colonies. If family dispersal for commercial purposes meant that Abigail Franks and her contemporaries might never see some of their children again, it also guaranteed marriage within the faith for a great many individuals, despite the minute size of the early American Jewish population. Nuclear families paid a severe price, but at the same time they assured the perpetuation of the Jewish religion in America.

The larger Atlantic world contributed even more to Judaism’s stability in the colonies, and later the young United States of America, by assisting with funds for the construction of synagogues and the acquisition of Torah scrolls. For example, when New York’s congregation began to build its first synagogue in 1728, it received a large donation from Curaçao’s Jewish community as well as contributions from the Jewish inhabitants of London, Jamaica, and Barbados. A generation later in 1761 the New Yorkers in turn provided a Torah scroll to the small Jewish population in Philadelphia, who at that time still worshiped in a private home. The New York community also provided money and a Torah to the Jews of Newport when they began to construct their synagogue in the late 1750s; and the Newporters also received financial contributions from the communities in London, Curaçao, Jamaica, and Suriname, along with Torah scrolls from London and Amsterdam.³⁴

Religious functionaries—kosher meat slaughterers, teachers, and hazanim, the cantors who led services in the synagogue and chanted the text of the Torah on Sabbaths, holidays, and during Monday and Thursday morning services—were also drawn from the larger Atlantic world. When possible, such personnel came from within the local congregation, as in Charleston, where Isaac Da Costa served as hazan between 1750 and 1775, or as in New York before the Revolution when Gershom Mendes Seixas became the first native-born American to become a hazan. The rule of thumb, however, was to advertise for religious officiants in foreign ports, as in Newport, where the community lured Judah Touro away from the Caribbean in 1759. Touro served as Newport’s hazan until 1779, when he went to New York because of his adherence to the British side during the Revolution, and ultimately returned to Jamaica when England finally lost the mainland colonies.³⁵

Unlike cantors, slaughterers, and teachers, the early American Jewish population did not conduct searches for rabbis. Judaism in America had no rabbinic expertise or leadership at the helm until the mid-nineteenth century, when the first rabbi in North America settled in Baltimore in 1840. In marked contrast, the congregations at Jamaica employed rabbis beginning in the early 1680s and had ordained rabbinic leadership throughout the course of the eighteenth century.³⁶ In the absence of trained rabbinic experts in the North American communities, knowledge of the intricacies of traditional religious law inevitably suffered,³⁷ although the congregations could and did on occasion turn for religious rulings to rabbinic authorities in London and Amsterdam.³⁸

Left to their own devices, the lay leaders of the congregations in North America did what they could to enforce religious norms, even in the private lives of their members, by resorting to several disciplinary devices. The mildest of these was admonition, but if that failed then the honor of being called to the Torah while it was read during services was the next step. The congregations could then move on to expulsion from membership in the community, a stringent form of punishment in that one who had been expelled could not be buried in the community’s cemetery. Finally, there was herem, or excommunication, an even more severe penalty, inasmuch as there could be no contact whatsoever, neither inside the synagogue nor outside it socially or commercially, with an individual who had been excommunicated.³⁹

Because there was as yet no movement to reform Jewish law and practices, what the Jewish communities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to maintain were the requirements of traditional rabbinic Judaism, or what today is called Orthodoxy. The community’s governing principles were those of the Sephardic ritual, but Ashkenazim in the privacy of their homes no doubt perpetuated many of their own variations of the prayers, ritual ceremonies, and customs, although the sources that have come down to us do not elucidate this point. What is striking, however, is that the Ashkenazim, though they were in the majority after 1720, accepted the primacy of the Sephardic rite in the synagogue; they neither sought to change it nor withdraw to establish their own congregations and cemeteries, for, with the exception of the rancor between the two groups in Georgia during the 1730s, Ashkenazim and Sephardim achieved a unique degree of unification in the English mainland colonies.

Not so anywhere else they encountered one another. Sephardim viewed themselves as in every way superior to Ashkenazim, whom they regarded as uncouth, backward, unrefined, and uneducated. Claiming descent for themselves from the aristocrats of ancient Israel, the Sephardim alleged that the Ashkenazim were descended from its lower classes. The Ashenazim, for their part, indicted the Sephardim as insufficiently religious, as wanting in their adherence to orthodox requirements. Mutual recrimination and ill-will led in England, Holland, and their respective colonies in the Caribbean and Suriname to separate synagogues, separate cemeteries, separate business firms—and to separate marriages. The occasional Sephardic man who defied convention and married an Ashkenazic women forfeited the privileges of membership in the synagogue, and his wife was referred to in the community’s marriage register not by her name but impersonally as “Tudesca,” the Sephardic term for “German woman.”⁴⁰

In contrast to the discord and contempt that characterized relations between these two great subdivisions within Judaism, the Ashenazim and Sephardim in North America achieved an unheard-of record of cooperation, which could have had no other effect than to buttress their small communities. They were buried in the same cemeteries, the first religious institution that was established in each new Jewish community.⁴¹ They joined hands to build their synagogues. In New York and Newport, for example, the community’s leading Sephardic and Ashkenazic members served on the committees responsible for erecting the structures, in New York’s case defying advice received from Curaçao’s haham to keep the Ashkenazim in their place. To the contrary, Ashkenazim served as presidents of the Sephardic-rite community of New York more frequently than Sephardim.⁴² Finally, contrary to what was undoubtedly the greatest taboo of all, marriages between Ashkenazic and Sephardic partners were more common in America than elsewhere, despite a raucous split within Sephardic ranks in New York that broke out in 1740 over the issue.⁴³

Judaism in early America was thus strengthened not only by the imposition of communal discipline but also by the rare degree of integration achieved by Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Nevertheless, while many early American Jews adhered to tradition—often rigorously so—many did not. For every Abigail Franks in New York who would not write a letter on a holiday and who pleaded with her son in London to observe the dietary laws and to pray every morning as the law required, there were others, also in New York, who had to be warned publicly in 1757 on the solemn Day of Atonement that they risked expulsion from membership and noninterment in the cemetery for having engaged in “Trading on the Sabath, Eating of forbidden Meats & other Heinous Crimes.”⁴⁴ If Massachusetts inhabitants during the American Revolution were impressed by the Sabbath scrupulousness of Jewish refugees from Newport, non-Jewish Americans in all of the thirteen original states were aware that their male Jewish neighbors did not cover their heads and had abandoned the practice of wearing beards.⁴⁵ And if Philadelphia’s community constructed a ritual bath in the 1780s, an extremely important requirement under the religious laws of family purity, two members of that same community could report in 1785 to a leading rabbi in Amsterdam that there was a “great lack of discipline that prevails in our generation,” complaining of declension in religious observance.⁴⁶ Above all, a small percentage of the Jewish population married out of the faith. While the numbers were small when compared with the rate of intermarriage at present, they suggest that, in early America, Judaism already confronted the challenges to its continuity that it would have to face in later eras as a consequence of its encounters with modernity. Between 1790 and 1820, references to intermarriage were included in the communities’ constitutions and regulations; contemporaries perceived they faced a growing problem.⁴⁷

Whatever the scope of the disenchantment Judaism faced in early America may have been, no initiatives to address the sources of disaffection emerged prior to 1820. The band of reformers in Charleston in 1824 who issued a call for change in the synagogue ritual, citing the high rate of synagogue absenteeism, the lack of decorum during services, and “the apathy and neglect which have been manifested towards our holy religion,” had no precedent during the lengthy Sephardic period of American Jewish history.⁴⁸ In marked contrast, however, early America’s Jews in the wake of the American Revolution daringly pursued change in quite another area, namely, the right to vote and to hold public office. They sought, in other words, equality of citizenship, and to achieve it they were willing to speak out openly and forcefully to their contemporary non-Jewish neighbors.

Throughout the colonial era the condition of the Jewish population in England’s colonies differed markedly from conditions endured in much of Europe, to the benefit of the Jews who settled in America. Antisemitism, while it certainly existed in the colonies in the form of traditional stereotypes and a few rare, but minor, outbursts, did not take the violent forms it frequently did in Europe, nor did it encompass the kinds of economic restrictions and legal disabilities that prevailed in many European jurisdictions.⁴⁹ Jews could reside anywhere: they could own land, engage in retail trade, and become artisans and craftsmen. Because the general environment was one in which toleration prevailed, Jews and Christians in the American colonies established business partnerships, formed personal friendships, summered together, and even on occasion married one another. Furthermore, colonial legislatures bestowed commercial privileges upon Jews. In Rhode Island during the 1750s, for example, the legislature conferred a ten-year monopoly upon a Jewish merchant who had petitioned for the right to produce potash using a secret process. In South Carolina a Jewish inhabitant held the vitally important position of inspector general of indigo for a decade, an appointment that gave him an edge for his own investments in indigo.⁵⁰

There was, however, one area to which toleration and acceptance did not extend: the political. Jews in the British colonies could neither vote nor serve in public office; they had no civic existence. Their exclusion from public life extended to the possibility of informal influence, as well, for there is no evidence to suggest that they served as advisers to public officials or participated in public debates on political issues. Even in America, therefore, the prevailing contemporary European theory that Jews comprised a separate nation applied. As members of an eternally separate people, they could never be incorporated into the body politic of the host nation. Public policy, office in government, and political activity was the one sector in which early American Jews did not mix with other colonial Americans. As the Reverend Ezra Stiles of Newport, a clergymen who was quite friendly toward Jews, remarked in 1761, “Providence seems to make everything to work for mortification of the Jews, and to prevent their incorporating into any nation; that thus they may continue a distinct people. . . . The opposition it has met with in Rhode Island, forebodes that the Jews will never become incorporated with the people of America any more than in Europe, Asia, and Africa.”⁵¹

One exception, New York City, did exist, but apparently the Reverend Stiles was not aware of it. The city admitted Jews to freemanship by not imposing religious requirements for it. Freemanship permitted one to vote in municipal elections; and between 1688 and 1770, fifty-seven Jewish New Yorkers became freemen and voted. In addition, they voted for seats in the colony’s legislature, until barred on grounds of religion by a statute enacted in 1737 as a result of a disputed election that year, but they continued to vote thereafter in municipal elections. Astonishingly, they served as city constables, a post that placed them in positions of authority over New Yorkers who were Christian, for constables served warrants, made arrests, kept the peace, walked the night watch, and were responsible for controlling vice, profanation of the Sabbath, and excessive drinking in taverns.⁵²

Everywhere else in England’s mainland colonies, however, the concept that Jews could not participate in the community’s public life prevailed. Nor did colonial American Jews challenge the status quo. No doubt they knew that any attempt to do so would be rebuffed decisively. That is what occurred in 1750 in Jamaica, England’s most important Caribbean colony, which had a larger Jewish population than that in any of the mainland colonies, when Abraham Sanches petitioned the island’s legislature for the right to vote on the grounds that he owned a large tract of land and had been naturalized. The reaction was swift, and it was uncompromising. Kingston’s inhabitants counterpetitioned that the Jews had “renounced their right of government to the governor, Pontius Pilate, in favour of the Roman emperors, in order to destroy, and put to the most cruel and ignominious death, Jesus Christ, the lord and saviour of mankind.” In another petition the residents of the parish of St. Catherine, where the island’s capital was located, cited another well-established truism: that Jews were not loyal to the societies in which they resided. Invoking the familiar concept that they permanently comprised a separate nation, the petitioners wrote: “The Jews are a foreign nation . . . and pay no voluntary obedience to our laws; but on the contrary, abhor both them and our religion. . . . To admit a nation, under such circumstances, to exercise a share in the legislature . . . might be destructive to our religion and constitution.” Faced with such opposition, Sanches’s petition failed.⁵³ In view of the fact that the Jews in the mainland colonies were in frequent contact with the Jews of Jamaica as part of their Atlantic trading and family networks, it is entirely likely that they knew about this abortive attempt to enter the political order.

With the advent of the American Revolution, however, Jews in America began to behave in a strikingly different manner: they began to comport themselves as if they actually had a role to play in public life. The change occurred everywhere, not just in New York City, where they had already enjoyed political inclusion for several decades, even if only on the municipal level. In Philadelphia the new assertiveness was apparent as early as 1765, when several Jewish merchants joined with non-Jewish merchants to sign the nonimportation agreement to protest against the Stamp Act by boycotting all English merchandise. In Savannah the city’s committee for revolutionary activities included two Jews who played highly visible roles, one of whom served as chairman of the committee. In Charleston Francis Salvador was elected to the colony’s first and second provincial congresses between 1773 and 1776—despite the fact that Jews had not yet been “incorporated.” Salvador’s participation was much in evidence, for he served on several of the congresses’ committees, helped to draft South Carolina’s first state constitution (which required a Christian oath to vote and serve in office), sat in the new state legislature after independence had been declared, and lost his life in battle against a Tory force.⁵⁴

These declarations of political choice were not limited to just a few. Throughout the new nation most Jews took sides in the struggle, in a majority of cases declaring themselves for the American side, but in some cases for the British. If for the American cause, then many, if not most, abandoned their homes and businesses when their towns fell under British control and crossed over behind American lines, a choice that amounted to an overt statement of political affiliation. Conversely, those Jews in smaller numbers who remained behind in localities under British control indicated thereby their support for the British side in the conflict. Jews who supported the American cause demonstrated their commitment even more vividly by volunteering for military service. Approximately one hundred, a sizable proportion of the adult male Jewish population, are known to have fought in the Continental Army or in the state militias.⁵⁵

The American Revolution, therefore, was a decisive turning point when examined in the context of Jewish exclusion from the political realm. It proved to be a milestone in the shift from the status of outsider to that of participant in the civic order. Moreover, it provided ammunition for the struggle that yet lay ahead for equality of citizenship. For despite the heady talk before and during the Revolution about natural rights and the equality of all men, as well as the definition of the struggle with England as one to secure civil rights and liberties, twelve of the thirteen state constitutions adopted during the course of the conflict prescribed religious tests for voting and serving in office that continued to bar Jews. Again there was only one exception: New York State’s constitution, adopted in 1777, eliminated religion as a prerequisite for political participation. In all remaining twelve states, on the other hand, the new constitutions (and in Connecticut and Rhode Island, where the colonial charters remained in effect) included Christianity among the requirements for political participation.⁵⁶ The country’s Jewish population responded by speaking out assertively, even confrontationally. When the officers of the Jewish community in Philadelphia protested in 1783 against the clause in the Pennsylvania constitution that required members of the state legislature to swear that both the Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired, a requirement that obviously disbarred Jews, they did not invoke the doctrine of natural rights but concentrated instead on their affiliation with the American cause during the recent struggle. As they wrote to the state’s officials,

Pennsylvania’s officials did not respond to this representation on behalf of equal citizenship. But a major breakthrough occurred a little more than a year later in Virginia. With the way charted by Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia legislature in 1785 proclaimed religious freedom, disestablished the Episcopalian Church, and abolished all religious tests for participation in public life. Virginia thereby jointed New York in extending equality of citizenship to Jews who might settle in the state. Jewish spokesmen did not play a part in this vitally important development—only a handful as yet resided in Virginia—underscoring that the acquisition of political equality hardly occurred solely because of Jewish initiative; the ideology and principles that emanated from the Revolution, after all, did count too. But, following this development, the nation’s Jews continued as earlier in Pennsylvania to make the case for inclusion, again basing it upon their contributions to the Revolution. Thus, a year after Virginia’s statute for religious freedom went into effect, one of Philadelphia’s Jewish leaders undertook to contact the men who were meeting behind closed doors in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to create a better form of government for the nation, in order to press the case for ending the political disabilities the Jewish population faced. Although he appealed to the doctrine of natural rights, he also firmly asserted of the Jews that “during the late Contest with England they have been foremost in aiding and assisting the states with their lifes [sic] and fortunes, they have supported the cause, have bravely fought and bled for liberty which they can not enjoy.”⁵⁸

An unparalleled opportunity to raise the issue of civic equality presented itself in 1790, when George Washington embarked on a tour of the nation. As he traveled, community organizations and institutions wrote to welcome him to their towns, and Washington would write back with his thanks. It was for this reason that the small Jewish community that yet remained in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to him in the summer of 1790, initiating what is the most important exchange of letters in American Jewish history between a president and the Jewish population. The incident’s fame stems from Washington’s well-known assertion that the government of the United States “to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” a ringing line the president took from the congregation’s letter to him. Less familiar, however, is another statement that had also appeared earlier in the congregation’s letter, which Washington also incorporated in his response, and which in effect put him on the side of equal citizenship for America’s Jewish inhabitants. In their letter to the president, the Newport Jews had introduced the issue of political equality, writing that, throughout the course of history, Jews had been denied “the invaluable rights of free citizens,” but that there now fortunately existed “a [federal] Government deeming every one, of whatever nation, tongue or language equal parts of the great governmental machine.” It was a government under which “All [have] liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” In his reply Washington closely repeated that last phrase, writing that “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” thereby suggesting that he accepted Jews as members of the political order. For the Jewish population of early America, this endorsement of their aspirations for incorporation, coming as it did from the Revolution’s hero and the symbolic father of the nation, represented the culmination of their campaign to turn the corner on the view that they belonged permanently to a separate (and not equal) nation. The Jews of Newport had indeed acted shrewdly when they included their references to the issue in their letter to the president.⁵⁹

As yet, however, eleven states excluded Jews from political participation. The barriers there began to fall, however, first in South Carolina and Pennsylvania in 1790, in Delaware in 1792, and in Georgia in 1798. Inasmuch as this still left seven of the original states with religious requirements for civic incorporation, Jewish spokesmen continued to press their case openly. In Maryland, for example, where Jews were beginning to settle in Baltimore, merchant Reuben Etting repeatedly submitted petitions for civic rights to the legislature in the late 1790s and early 1800s, although inclusion would not come until 1826, and only after a lengthy, bitter struggle that began in 1818 and continued for eight years, a battle initiated and fought out in the state’s legislature by sympathetic non-Jews.⁶⁰ In North Carolina a Jewish spokesman again took a bold stand. There in 1809 Jacob Henry was elected to the legislature, but was challenged when he sought to take his seat on the grounds that the state’s constitution required that he take an oath affirming the New Testament’s divinity. Henry argued successfully that he supported the principle that officeholders had to subscribe to religious beliefs but specific beliefs could not be made mandatory.⁶¹ Even more eloquently, in Charleston in 1816 Isaac Harby protested in a letter to Secretary of State James Monroe against barring anyone on the basis of religion from appointment to a position in government, in the course of which he envisioned a society in which religious pluralism and political inclusion prevailed. Harby formulated his challenge to religious tests for government service after Monroe recalled the country’s Jewish consul to Tunis because of his religion. Harby wrote to the secretary of state that Jews were “by no means to be considered as a Religious sect, tolerated by the government; they constitute a portion of the People. They are, in every respect, woven in and compacted with the citizens of the Republic. Quakers and Catholics, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, Baptists and Jews, all constitute one great political family.”⁶²

While Harby’s eloquent words did not sway the secretary of state, their significance lies in the mere fact that they could be uttered at all—that in America members of the Jewish faith could and did speak directly to power and lay claim to the right to express political power. In doing so, they, as others, contributed to the evolution of equality and democracy in the United States. This, together with their creation of a permanent Jewish presence in America, is a central feature of the legacy that the Jews of early America bequeathed to their successors.

1. For varying accounts of the arrival in 1654 and the composition of the population, see Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Exodus from Brazil and Arrival in New Amsterdam of the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers, 1654,” in Martin A. Cohen, ed., The Jewish Experience in Latin America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 2 vols. (Waltham, MA, 1971), 2:320–27; and Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, “The Problem of the First Jewish Settlers in New Amsterdam, 1654,” Studia Rosenthaliana 15 (1981): 169–77.

2. The hazards of arrest by the Inquisition included forfeiture of one’s property, torture, going mad in its dungeons, and being handed over to the civil authorities for death by burning during a grand public spectacle. For the Portuguese Inquisition, see Alexandre Herculano, History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, trans. John C. Branner (New York, 1968 [1926]); for Spain’s: Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1966), especially volume 2; and Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, 1997). For a brief description of public executions of allegedly heretical New Christians in Portugal in 1739, one may consult Stanley F. Chyet, Lopez of Newport: Colonial American Merchant Prince (Detroit, 1970), 15.

3. For accounts of the Dutch Jewish community’s development, see volume 15 of Salo Wittmayer Baron’s A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed., 17 vols. (New York, 1952–1980); Jonathan I. Israel, “The Economic Contribution of Dutch Sephardi Jewry to Holland’s Golden Age, 1595–1713,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 96 (1983): 505, 513, and his The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), passim. Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1976 [1950]), 25, places the number of Jews at three thousand around 1650.

4. On the movement of Ashkenzic Jews westward, see generally Moses A. Shulvass, From East to West: The Westward Migration of Jews from Eastern Europe During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Detroit, 1971).

5. The authoritative account of the Jews of Brazil, 1630–1654, is Arnold Wiznitzer’s Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960). For the information in this and the preceding paragraph, see 12–41, 46, 51–54, 59, 65–66, 71–72, 74, 81, 86, 130–35.

6. On the effort by the Portuguese to retake Brazil and the impact upon the Dutch (including Jewish) population, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford, 1957), 159–245.

7. Our knowledge that some went to Barbados and Martinique is from a petition the twenty-three refugees in New Amsterdam sent to the officers of the Dutch West India Company after they arrived on Manhattan Island; Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875, 3d ed. (New York, n.d.), 3.

8. Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, 1986), 62, 67–68, 115–16, 134–35, 156, 158, 169, 171, 172, 175–77, 206, 212–13.

9. Robert Cohen, “The Egerton Manuscript,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62 (1972–1973): 334–35; Jacob R. Marcus and Stanley F. Chyet, eds., Simon Cohen, trans., Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam, 1788 (Cincinnati, 1974), 183–88; Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1970), 1:38, 42, 45; Morris A. Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport: Two and a Half Centuries of Judaism, 1658–1908 (New York, 1936), 340–42; Leon Huhner, The Life of Judah Touro (1775–1854) (Philadelphia, 1946), 10, 145, note 5.

10. The ongoing struggle involving the Jews of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant, and the Company may be followed in the documents assembled by Schappes, A Documentary History, 1–13.

11. The two were Jacob de Lucena and Asser Levy. The former is known to have been present in New York as late as 1678, as per Samuel Oppenheim, The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664: Some New Matter on the Subject (New York, 1909), 23, 60. Levy resided in the town until his death in 1683; see Leo Hershkowitz, “Original Inventories of Early New York Jews,” American Jewish History 90 (2002): 251–52.

12. Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970), 1:216.

13. Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport, 36–38, 40–43, 46, 81–82, 113–14; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:90; and “Items Relating to the Jews of Newport,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 27 (1920): 175–76.

14. That Jewish settlement in Barbados grew in the 1660s and 1670s is evident from customhouse records and the existence of a synagogue by 1664: Wilfred S. Samuel, “A Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados in the Year 1680,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 13 (1932–1935): 95; “Quaker Records,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 15 (1947–48): 82; Hispanic Society of America, New York City, A Coppie Journall of Entries Made in the Custom House of Barbados Beginning August ye 10th 1665 continued in two distinct accotts to ye 24th Aprl [sic] 1667 & containes Ye accott Currant of 2 yeares 8½ months, passim, for Jewish merchants like Luis Dias, Abraham Burgos, David Namias, David Gabay, Anthony Rodrigues, Samuel De Leon, among others. In Jamaica the governor reported in 1672 that twenty-nine Jews resided there; Public Record Office, Kew, CO 1/28, no. 27, 57.

15. David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654–1954 (New York, 1955), 303; for Jews in New York in the 1680s: David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682–1831 (New York, 1952); population data are in Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:256, 258, 308, 390–91; and the construction of the synagogue may be followed in the opening pages of the New York community’s records: “The Earliest Extant Minute Books of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, 1728–1786,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 21 (1913): 3ff.

16. Saul Jacob Rubin, Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry, 1733–1983 (N.p., 1983), 1–3, 10.

17. For the conflicts between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in general, see the discussion infra. For the possibility of a synagogue (as well as their quarrels): Rubin, Third to None, 3–5. For an eyewitness to their contentiousness, the Reverend Martin Bolzius, see R. D. Barnett, “Dr. Samuel Nunes Ribeiro and the Settlement of Georgia,” Migration and Settlement: Proceedings of the Anglo-American Jewish Historical Conference Held in London Jointly by the Jewish Historical Society of England and the American Jewish Historical Society, July 1970 (London, 1971), 87, 94.

18. Rubin, Third to None, 16–21, 25.

19. Barnett A. Elzas, The Jews of South Carolina from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Philadelphia, 1905), 19–20, 23–30, 32–35, 120–21. In 1790 Charleston had 200 Jewish inhabitants, New York 242; in 1820 Charleston had around 700, New York 550. See Ira Rosenswaike, “An Estimate and Analysis of the Jewish Population of the United States in 1790,” in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 5 vols. (Waltham, MA, 1969), 1:395, 400; and Ira Rosenswaike, “The Jewish Population of the United States as Estimated from the Census of 1820,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 53 (1963–64): 152.

20. Edwin Wolf II and Maxwell Whiteman, The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson (Philadelphia, 1965), 23, 26, 30–32, 41–42, 53, 58–59, 114–21.

21. The evolution of Newport’s Jewish community as well as Lopez’s history can be followed in Chyet, Lopez of Newport, but the date of 1746 is derived from the documents in the Court of Chancery of Jamaica, located at the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town; see 1A/3/17, 30–31, for a case that involved Naphtali Hart, who resided in Newport but was involved in a privateering matter that came before chancery in Jamaica. The population figure on the eve of the revolution has been derived from the colony’s 1774 census: Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Taken by Order of the General Assembly in the Year 1774 (Providence, 1858).

22. See Ira Rosenswaike, “The Jews of Baltimore to 1810,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 64 (1974–1975): 291–320 ; and Ira Rosenswaike, “The Jews of Baltimore: 1810 to 1820,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 67 (1977–1978): 101–24. For Richmond, consult Herbert T. Ezekiel and Gaston Lichtenstein, The History of the Jews of Richmond from 1769 to 1917 (Richmond, 1917); and Myron Berman, Richmond’s Jewry, 1769–1976 (Charlottesville, 1979).

23. For these localities, see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. 1, passim.

24. Rosenswaike, “Jewish Population of the United States in 1790,” and Rosenswaike, “Jewish Population from the Census of 1820.”

25. Jacob Rader Marcus, the premiere historian of the Jews of early America, determined that Ashkenazim were in the majority by 1720; see Jacob R. Marcus, Studies in American Jewish History: Studies and Addresses (Cincinnati, 1969), 52.

26. Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel, New York,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 27 (1920): 15–16.

27. Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia, 1979), 266; Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (Oxford, 1985), 246–47.

28. During the 1990s, allegations that Jews financed, dominated, and controlled the slave trade captured wide attention and were widely accepted in the African American community (on the latter point, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” New York Times, July 20, 1992, A15). Subsequent extensive research demonstrated that this was not the case, for which see, for example, David Brion Davis, “Jews in the Slave Trade,” Culturefront (Fall 1992): 42–45; Seymour Drescher, “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Immigrants and Minorities 12 (1993): 113–25; Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York, 1998); and Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998). For numerical data demonstrating the minute role played by mainland colonial Jews in the importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean and their marginal role as slave sellers, see Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 131–42.

29. Leo Hershkowitz, ed., Wills of Early New York Jews (1704–1799) (New York, 1967), passim; Jerome H. Wood Jr., Conestoga Crossroads: Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1790 (Harrisburg, 1979), 97; Thomas J. Tobias, “Joseph Tobias of Charles Town: Linguister,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 49 (1959–1960): 36; and Charles Reznikoff and Uriah Z. Engelman, The Jews of Charleston: A History of an American Jewish Community (Philadelphia, 1950), 15.

30. For examples, see Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 154n39.

31. Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 33, 44, 65.

32. For examples of such long-distance marriages, see Faber, A Time for Planting, 42, 47–48.

33. Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, eds., The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Colonial Correspondence: Letters of the Franks Family (1733–1748) (Waltham, MA, 1968); for the lives of members of the Franks family, see the introduction, for Abigail Franks’s pained reflection, see p. 93.

34. “The Earliest Extant Minute Books,” 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 81; Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport, 88, 94, 105–6.

35. “The Earliest Extant Minute Books,” 73, 84–85, 92, 100–1; Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport, 72–73, 82, 116.

36. Jamaica’s first rabbi came from Curaçao as early as 1683; M. Kayserling, “The Jews in Jamaica and Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna,” Jewish Quarterly Review 12 (1900): 711.

37. In 1779, when Solomon Myers-Cohen and Belle Simon married, the bride’s father served as a witness when he signed their otherwise traditional marriage contract. Jewish religious law, however, does not permit a relative to serve as a witness. The ketubah (contract) was written in an elegant hand, suggesting that, while knowledge of the law suffered in early America, Hebrew calligraphy was alive and well. The contract is in the Gratz Family papers, American Jewish Historical Society (New York).

38. For a general discussion of the consultations between the English congregations in the Americas and London, see R. D. Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of London during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 20 (1959–61): 1–50. For a case in 1785 in which a faction within the Philadelphia community turned to a major rabbinic authority in Amsterdam for a ruling, see Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., American Jewry—Documents—Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati, 1959), 139–41.

39. For examples of these techniques in New York, see “The Earliest Extant Minute Books,” 71, 74–75, 81. For withholding religious honors in Philadelphia in 1770 for violations of the Sabbath: Marcus, American Jewry, 96. For efforts to maintain communal discipline between 1790 and 1820 in New York, Charleston, and Savannah: ibid., 166, 179–81; and Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, eds., The Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (New York, 1963), 2:552.

40. In addition to the article by R. D. Barnett cited in note 17 above, see Cecil Roth, The Great Synagogue, London, 1690–1940 (London, 1950), 2–3, 7–8, 12–13, 16–17, 59–60, 73; H. J. Zimmels, Ashkenazim and Sephardim: Their Relations, Differences, and Problems as Reflected in Their Rabbinical Responsa (London, 1958), 85–87, 99–102, 108, 110, 113–14, 165–66, 182, 188, 194, 241, 279–83; Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Community, 1492–1951 (London, 1952), 170–71; and Lee M. Friedman, Rabbi Haim Issac Carigal: His Newport Sermon and His Yale Portrait (Boston, 1940), 18.

41. Jewish law requires interment in a Jewish cemetery surrounded by a wall, while worship can take place anywhere. Accordingly, cemeteries came first, synagogues later. In New York the earliest settlers acquired cemetery property in 1656, while the first permanent settlers did so in 1682; the first synagogue did not rise until 1728. The dates for the first cemeteries and synagogues in the remaining colonial-era communities are, respectively, 1677 and 1759 in Newport; 1738 and 1782 in Philadelphia; by 1773 and 1820 in Savannah; and by 1764 and 1794 in Charleston.

42. Data for the New York community, the only one whose records have survived, indicate that, of the forty-six persons who served as president or assistant between 1728 and 1760, 35 percent were definitely Ashkenazic and another 19 percent probably were. Those who were definitely Sephardic comprised only 33 percent of the total. These computations are based upon a close reading of the annual elections for officers in “The Earliest Extant Minute Books.” For the haham’s advice: David de Sola Pool, The Mill Street Synagogue (1730–1817) of the Congregation Shearith Israel (New York, 1930), 49. The building committee in New York was comprised of Sephardics Luis Moses Gomez, Mordecai Gomez, and Benjamin Mendes Pacheco, and Ashkenazic Jacob Franks, as recorded in “The Earliest Extant Minute Books,” 43. According to Malcolm Stern’s findings of 942 American Jewish marriages between 1686 and 1840, 16.4 percent involved Ashkenazim and Sephardim, exceeding the 10.7 percent of Sephardim who wed Sephardim. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, the number of marriages that united representatives of the two groups was lower. Malcolm H. Stern, “The Function of Genealogy in American Jewish History,” Essays in American Jewish History to Commemorate the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives Under the Direction of Jacob Rader Marcus (Cincinnati, 1958), 74–81. In 1740, in New York, the Sephardic Isaac Mendes Seixas wed Ashkenazic Rachel Levy. His fellow Sephardim vociferously disapproved, but Seixas, persisting, married Levy and retaliated by not inviting any of the Sephardim to the wedding. The incident was recounted by Abigail Franks in letters to her son in London; Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 66–67, 76.

44. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 7–8, 69; “The Earliest Extant Minute Books,” 74–75.

45. Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport, 132; Abram Vossen Goodman, “A German Mercenary Observes American Jews During the Revolution,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 59 (1969–70): 227; and the many contemporary portraits in Richard Brilliant, Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America (Munich, 1997), in which early American Jews had themselves depicted without beards or head covering.

46. Marcus, American Jewry, 134–36, 141.

47. Stern, “The Function of Genealogy,” passim, for the numbers involved. For references in the constitutions and regulations of New York in 1790, Savannah in 1791, Philadelphia in 1798, and Charleston in 1820 as to how members who married non-Jews were to be dealt with, see Marcus, American Jewry, 129, 150, 160–61, 179–80, and Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:551.

48. See Schappes, A Documentary History, 171–77, for the petition of the first group to suggest a course of reform for American Judaism.

49. For a catalogue of antisemitic incidents and remarks during the colonial era, see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1117–34. For incidents between 1780 and 1820, see Rubin, Third to None, 96–97; Nathan M. Kaganoff, “An Early American Synagogue Desecration,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58 (1968–1969): 136; Wolf and Whiteman, The History of the Jews of Philadelphia, 110–13; Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988; 3d ser.): 10–11; Jacob Rader Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 1775–1865, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1955–1956), 1:85–86; and Schappes, A Documentary History, 92–96.

50. Abram Vossen Goodman, American Overture: Jewish Rights in Colonial Times (Philadelphia, 1947), 51; and Reznikoff and Engelman, The Jews of Charleston, 23–33.

51. Stiles’s comment is cited in Chyet, Lopez of Newport, 37–38.

52. Leo Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the New York Jewish Merchant and Community, 1654–1820,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 66 (1976–1977): 13, 16–18; Beverly McAnear, “The Place of the Freeman in Old New York,” New York History 21 (1940): 419, 425; Goodman, American Overture, 111–12, 114. For Jews who served as constables, or who declined to do so even when elected, see Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 36, 56, 65, 75, 99, 118, 140.

53. Assembly of Jamaica, Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 14 vols. (Jamaica, 1811–1829), 4:238, 246–47, 249.

54. Goodman, American Overture, 165–66, 199; Jacob R. Marcus, “Jews and the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Documentary,” American Jewish Archives 27 (1975): 116–19, 124–25, 128–29; Samuel Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots: The Jews in the American Revolution (Westport, CT, 1975), 23–24; Miriam K. Freund, Jewish Merchants in Colonial America (New York, 1939), 40; and William V. Byars, B. and M. Gratz, Merchants in Philadelphia, 1754–1798 (Jefferson City, MO, 1916), 14.

55. Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots, 21–66; Chyet, Lopez of Newport, 156–62; Byars, B. and M. Gratz, 20, 158; Wolf and Whiteman, The Jews of Philadelphia, 84; de Sola Pool, The Mill Street Synagogue, 56; Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport, 182; and Reznikoff and Engleman, The Jews of Charleston, 50.

56. Stanley F. Chyet, “The Political Rights of Jews in the United States: 1776–1840,” in Jacob R. Marcus, ed., Critical Studies in American Jewish History: Selected Articles from American Jewish Archives, 3 vols. (Cincinnati, 1971), 2:35–62.

57. Schappes, A Documentary History, 65.

58. Ibid., 68–69.

59. The exchange of letters can be followed in ibid., 79–81.

60. Chyet, “The Political Rights,” 53–62. On the struggle in Maryland, see Edward Eitches, “Maryland’s ‘Jew Bill,’” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 60 (1970–1971): 258–79. Documents in the Maryland controversy are in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 1:33–55.

61. Schappes, A Documentary History, 122–25.

62. Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:318–23; and Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Modecai Noah (New York, 1981), 27–28.