For some months now preparations have been busily going forward for the celebration of the Tercentenary of Jewish settlement in America, which formally begins in September of this year. Cecil Roth, British historian, whose distinguished work both in Jewish and general history is as well known here as in England, sends us, along with his congratulatory handshake across the sea, a friendly reminder. Americans are apt to think that no nation but America has known freedom; and many American Jews, correspondingly, are apt to think that nowhere but in America has their group been truly free. But Mr. Roth recalls for us that the Jews of his own country enjoyed both religious and social freedom as early and to as great a measure as they found here, and that in this, as in so much else, the great Atlantic democracies express a common tradition. 

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All of us in England, as elsewhere, welcome the news of plans to celebrate the tercentenary of the settlement of Jews in what is now the United States. Such celebrations are all to the good, and this one especially for the possibility that it offers of an enlarged understanding of the heritage of freedom and opportunity for the more abundant life that Jews, like others, continue to enjoy in the West. For a historian, there is the additional satisfaction of seeing the materials of his concern brought to imaginative life for large numbers of non-specialists; some historians are so bold as to think that a grasp of historical realities is one of the chief roots of a proper pride in one’s country and a proper understanding of one’s role in it. But it must also be said that such occasions of official celebration also breed some uneasiness in the breast of the historian. For they have been known to give renewed currency to myths and legends that diminish, rather than enhance, our understanding of the true course of human events.

So, quite naturally, some of us in England have a bit of premonitory fear, maybe totally unwarranted, that the observance of this great anniversary may see a revival of the now superseded melodramatic presentation of the early chapters of the history of the United States in relation to the Mother Country, with American Jewish history presented in such a way as to retell an old—and historically inaccurate—tale, and to point an old—and confusing—moral.

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We can recall the old story from our childhoods without too much difficulty. We are shown, as it were, a group of fugitives from the oppression of the Old World who took refuge in the newly opened land beyond the Atlantic, found a ready welcome there, and, even before the American Revolution crystallized their rights, established among the sturdy pioneers a precedent of freedom such as the Old World had never known. From the very beginning, all on the one side of the Atlantic is bright, and all (or almost all) on the other side is made to appear dark.

This is very far from the truth—not perhaps in every detail, but certainly in spirit. We in England, too, are about to celebrate, in two years’ time, the tercentenary of the establishment of our modern Jewish community. And if, in anticipation, we review in our minds the picture which Anglo-Jewish history presents, what we see actually is not far removed from that of American Jewish history.

For the American reader this is in many cases perhaps somewhat difficult to appreciate because of the initial, shall we more politely say preconceptions, rather than prejudices, with which he inevitably begins. England, in early American history, is the archoppressor. Ergo, in 18th-century Jewish history, too, England belongs to the powers of darkness, and the New World brought deliverance where the Old World, including England, knew only oppression. Even in some of the most recent American Jewish historical literature, written on the basis of the widest documentary evidence, and on the whole with great objectivity, this point of view is adopted. But it is based on too wide a generalization.

Two points in particular impress themselves. The one is, that the roseate picture of the conditions of American Jewry is overstressed. I do not suggest that there was oppression, or anything like it; but there was occasional discomfort, and some degree of discrimination. The other is that, though there was general oppression in the Old World, it was not universal, and at the time with which we are dealing (that is, in the century before the Declaration of American Independence) England was on the whole an honorable exception. In fact, there was not at this period much difference between the condition of the Jews in the Mother Country and in the American Colonies which inherited her tradition and perpetuated her attitudes. What one may term the new 18th-century attitude towards the Jews was thus—if we look at the record—not an American innovation, but a common development of the Anglo-Saxon world. It seems to me that at present, when the future of Diaspora Jewry is centered almost wholly in the English-speaking countries, this is a matter of something more than academic significance. We do not merely speak the same language; we have basically, to a great extent, the same historic experience. We have enjoyed similar benefits, built our communities in circumstances of similar opportunity.

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Let us survey, cursorily, conditions in the Old World at the time when American Jewish history began, at the close of the 17th century. The Moslem countries need hardly be taken into account in the present connection; in them the Jews—whether treated brutally as in North Africa or generously as in Turkey—were a people apart, subjected to special legislation, special taxation, and special circumstances. In Christian Europe, conditions varied widely. Spain and Portugal excluded the Jews entirely, and any person of Jewish descent found observing Jewish rites and ceremonies ran the risk of being burned alive. The same applied to southern Italy and Sicily. In the north of Italy, in the areas where Jews were allowed to live they were shut up in ghettoes from which they dared not absent themselves overnight; they had to wear a distinguishing badge, were excluded from all means of livelihood except wholesale trade, pawnbroking, peddling, and dealing in secondhand clothes, and subjected to all manner of other indignities and disabilities; even their children might be seized, on the flimsiest pretexts, in order to be brought up as Christians.

In Germany, conditions were very much the same or even worse. Great areas and important cities excluded the Jews entirely; they were compelled to pay special tolls on the highway; the number of their marriages was restricted so as to keep down the Jewish population; and the fact that here and there influential court Jews (such as the famous Jew Süss) might temporarily enjoy great influence and wealth, did not qualify the gloom of the general picture. As late as 1670 the Jews were expelled from Austria, as late as 1738 from Wurttemberg, as late as 1745 from Prague and Bohemia generally. They had been driven out of France in the 14th century and, at the time we speak of, were still not allowed officially to live there: although, to be sure, in the newly acquired eastern provinces (Alsace and Lorraine) there were some old-established communities that barely managed to live under the same miserable conditions as the Jews of Germany, and in the seaports of the southwest (Bordeaux and Bayonne) some Marrano fugitives from Spain and Portugal were allowed to practice a semi-clandestine Judaism. The greatest mass of European Jewry lived in Poland—a rightless, hopeless, miserable ethnic minority, terrorized by recurrent accusations of ritual murder, and with little hope except in emigration. Russia was judenrein, permitting no Jewish settlement.

So far as the continent of Europe was concerned, the only country which presented a generally favorable picture was Holland, from which both the English and the American Jewish communities, to some extent, drew their origin and inspiration. Holland is in fact to be excepted from the generalizations made in this presentation, its Jewish community belonging as it were to the new Anglo-Saxon (or rather Atlantic, or perhaps Puritan) nexus. It may, however, be observed that even in Holland there were qualifications to the generally happy record. Some parts of the country (e.g. Utrecht) excluded Jews from residence; there was a special form of Jewish oath, and special Jewish taxation; and outbreaks of violence were not wholly unknown.

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As it happened, it was approximately the same time as the “St. Charles” brought the first Jewish group to New Amsterdam that the Jews began to settle (or rather resettle after an absence of three and a half centuries) in England. There is no need here to describe the antecedents or the circumstances of the resettlement. Briefly, it may be said that the first crypto-Jewish settlers arrived about 1632, that by 1653 it was alleged that “some quarters of our city smell as rank of” Judaism as Amsterdam itself, that Menasseh ben Israel attempted to get the resettlement placed on a legal footing when he came over to London in 1655, and that an open or semi-open Jewish community was organized in 1656. A point that must be emphasized is that there was no official act of admission—no formal agreement between the Jewish representatives and the government, as the result of which the community came into being. The characteristic feature of the resettlement was its informality: Oliver Cromwell, not succeeding in persuading his council to do as he wanted, decided to “connive” at the presence of the Jews. (Cromwell was mindful of the help that the Jews might give, and was, besides, motivated by his general religious tolerance.) Since there was no formal permission or contract, there could, of course, be no regulations; and since there were no regulations, English Judaism was allowed to develop in a completely untrammeled fashion. As a result, the resettlement of the Jews in England took place in an atmosphere of almost unqualified freedom; and this became the characteristic of the new period of Jewish history in the Anglo-Saxon countries, irradiating from the Mother Country to the New World.

As I have expressed it elsewhere, on more than one occasion, though political emancipation was not yet thought of (and how could it be, with Non-conformists and Roman Catholics excluded from it?), what may be termed social emancipation prevailed from the outset. The Jews who settled in England in the middle of the 17th century onwards could live in whatever city they pleased and in any part of the place of their choice; they could dress as they pleased; they could with certain reservations engage in any calling they pleased; they were subjected to no galling special regulations or restrictions; they could employ Gentile servants and workmen; they did not have to take a degrading form of oath before the courts of law, or pay special taxation; and those disabilities from which they suffered were not directed against them but were shared by all who were not members of the Church of England.

To put it succinctly: the ghetto system (in its general rather than its literal sense: oppressive discrimination was possible even without a formally constituted Jewish quarter), which applied universally on the continent of Europe except Holland at this time, was unknown in England, as in the English dependencies generally, after the resettlement. Here is a fundamental difference between the record of Jews and of Jewish emancipation in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in other parts of the world: a difference which Continental historians failed to appreciate, and which makes the background of Jewish history in these lands wholly unlike, in a most significant fashion, that of Central and Eastern Europe. Neither in England nor in America was it a question of “Emancipation” in the Continental sense—that is, of emergence from slavery to liberty—but rather, as in wider constitutional matters, of “freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent,” perhaps, to be sure, with some kind of legislative encouragement. From 1933 onwards, we were menacingly warned by some of those who sought refuge in our midst, and some of those who wished to reconstitute Jewish life on a wholly different basis, that we too might slip back into the ghetto. It is no business of mine here to discuss whether or not this pessimism was justified. But it is assuredly germane to emphasize the fact that in our background there was no ghetto.

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It is perhaps worthwhile to compare stage by stage the process by which the Jewish settlers in what was to be the United States consolidated their position with the process in England at about the same period. I use for the purpose the careful synopsis published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee itself. We are informed that the original settlers, “wanderers in search of freedom, had caught a glimpse of their goal in this little Dutch village between the wilderness and the sea,” then known as New Amsterdam. Their first victory was the right to remain, obtained on April 16, 1655, from the Dutch East India Company. The Marrano settlers in England at this period had in fact never had their right of residence challenged officially since the beginning of the century. At the Whitehall Conference which assembled in December 1655 to consider Menasseh ben Israel’s proposals for the readmission of the Jews, the legal experts had pronounced that there was no law which excluded them from England. In May 1656, a Marrano of Spanish birth, proceeded against as an enemy alien, pleaded that he was a Jew and found his plea admitted by the justices. Thus, the legality of the residence of Jews in England, as a juridical right rather than a special privilege, was established—a fact that cannot have been without influence when the new American Jewish settlement passed in 1664 under English rule.

The second stage of which we learn in the consolidation of the position of New York—i.e. American—Jewry was the vindication of the right to serve in the militia. This has perhaps been overemphasized by American historians—in a frontier town, it is neither easy nor sensible to dispense with the services of any able-bodied male. The position in England was not therefore similar in this respect, and the problem was not put to the test so early. Nevertheless, from 1685 at the latest, the London Synagogue furnished three soldiers, fully armed, to the Trainbands which were called out when the peace was threatened, and a more consistent record of voluntary military service was not long delayed.

The next point in the record of the establishment of the New York American community was the right to travel and trade—in the first instance along the Hudson and Delaware Rivers (November-December 1655). So far as English Jewry is concerned, there is in this connection a very important point to note. The right to travel and to trade freely seems to have been taken from the beginning as implicit in the right of residence. The nature of the trade may have been to some extent restricted locally (we must return to this point), but that Jews were allowed to trade was not, so far as I know, seriously disputed at any time. The fact of settlement implied moreover the right of travel to and fro, and hence the right of travel generally: never was there (as on the Continent) any need for special formalities or permission, or any obligation to pay special tolls. Moreover, the right of settlement was not localized, or bound up with any one city. If the Jews were permitted to reside in London, this was by virtue of the fact that it was legal for them to reside in the country, and the right of residence elsewhere could not be challenged. Jews are to be found living outside London within a very few years of the resettlement, some time before the end of the 17th century. Early in the 18th, specific communities began to be established in various provincial cities—well before any permanent traces of Jewish communities are to be found in any city other than New York in what was to become the United States. I believe that England was the only country of the Western world in which the Jews exercised at this time unrestricted rights of residence.

Too great importance is not presumably to be attached to the fact that the New Amsterdam Jews established the right to have their own burial ground in February 1656. This was inevitable, if Jews were to be allowed to reside in the country at all. In London, exactly a month and two days after the New Amsterdam Jews were granted permission to have their cemetery, the group of Marranos headed by Menasseh ben Israel had petitioned Oliver Cromwell for leave to have a synagogue and that “those which may dey of owr nation may be buried in such place out of the cittye as we shall thinck Convenient with the Proprietors Leaue in whose Land the place shall be.” Although Cromwell’s answer is not preserved (it was probably communicated verbally), the land for this House of Life was leased early in the following year, and public interments began to take place there shortly after. The English and American concessions were thus almost contemporaneous. At approximately the same time (probably in the summer of 1656) a proper congregation was organized in London, as has been mentioned, and early in 1657 a semi-public synagogue was opened. It is noteworthy that the directors of the Dutch West India Company had given instructions, on June 14, 1656, that the Jews were not to be permitted to conduct public religious services in New Amsterdam, no specially constructed synagogue being indeed known there until 1730; the exquisite Bevis Marks Synagogue in London had already at that time been open for twenty-eight years.

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“The right to own their own homes” figures next in the official brochure among the steps whereby the little group of New York Jews consolidated their position. This as a matter of fact oversimplifies a complex and in some ways contradictory measure. The order of June 14 referred to above had indeed empowered the Jews to trade and to buy real estate. So far as the ownership of real estate was concerned, the question was easier in a new country than in an old one. In England all sorts of complications existed. At the beginning, it seems that native-born or endenizened Jews did in fact buy landed property, sometimes on a large scale. Later on, some doubt arose as to whether this was in fact legal, an antiquated medieval statute which ostensibly forbade it having come to light. Henceforth, the practice was restricted for a time. Nevertheless an easy alternative was possible in cases of doubt: to acquire an interminably long lease (such as 999 years) at a nominal or symbolic rental—a generally common practice in England. The tenant in this case did not technically “own” the land, but to say that he did not own his home would be a quibble. This was not seriously considered a disability, nor was the nominal difference in this respect between English and American Jewry of any real significance.

On the other hand, the same provision of June 14, 1656, excluded the Jews of New Amsterdam from the right to open retail shops or to practice crafts. Our consideration of this point must be taken into account with the next of the rights established by the little group—that of the burghership (April 20, 1657). Here, we come to a point which could be of the highest significance, for to enjoy the rights of a citizen then had a very great importance. Dr. Jacob Marcus, however, than whom there is no greater authority on American Jewish history living today, gives it as his considered opinion that “the Jews . . . were second-class burghers, citizens with circumscribed economic liberties . . . they are not found . . . in the official list of the ‘freemen’ of the town.” In England—or at least in London; I do not think that any similar restriction applied in other places—conditions in this respect were nominally a good deal worse, for after an initial hesitation Jews were formally excluded from the Freedom of the City of London, which implied exclusion from practicing handicrafts and carrying on retail trade within its liberties. However—and this is the important point to note—already at this time “London” and the “City of London” were two different things, the residential and commercial area extending far, far beyond the old City nucleus administered by the Lord Mayor and Common Council. Hence the restriction, though in some ways galling, was almost meaningless. If a Jew wished to open a shop for retail trade, or establish a small manufactory, all he had to do was to move just outside the City boundaries: a subterfuge which in New York was impossible. So far as wholesale trade was concerned, there was of course no restriction; and when the Royal Exchange (to be carefully distinguished from the Stock Exchange, with which it is often confused even by competent authorities) was reorganized in 1697, one-twelfth of the places on it were reserved for Jewish brokers and agents.

In the political sense, a further important step on the path of Jewish emancipation in Colonial America came in the 18th century with the recognition of the right of Jews to the franchise: something unknown on the continent of Europe until the French Revolution, and not universal until long after. In 1737, in a contested election in New York, the votes cast by Jews were disqualified on the ground that Jews did not have the franchise in England. In 1761, however, Jews were admitted to the polls, apparently without difficulty. What the precise position was in England at this time it is not easy to say with any confidence. The Returning Officer had the power to demand from voters the Oath of Abjuration—aimed, actually, against Roman Catholics—which was phrased in a form repugnant to the Jewish conscience. But this power was seldom exercised, and there is good reason to believe that well before the American Revolution native-born English Jews who possessed the necessary qualifications did in fact vote in Parliamentary elections if they pleased. It must be emphasized that the political emancipation of the Jews in 1858—which we know most about because of the drama surrounding the fight for its granting—involved only their admission to Parliament.

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It is necessary to devote a few lines at this point to a famous earlier episode in connection with this question, in Anglo-Jewish history of the 18th century, which has been generally misinterpreted on both sides of the Atlantic, thus tending to distort the entire picture. In 1753, the English Parliament passed a bill for Jewish naturalization. This attracted some attention, was seized upon by the Opposition, gave rise to an exaggerated agitation, and in consequence was repealed before the end of the year. Thereupon, some historians have pronounced, Anglo-Jewry relapsed once more into conditions of medieval darkness: and the contrast between this reaction and American conditions of semi-emancipation has been more than once emphasized. But this interpretation is wholly incorrect. The Jewish naturalization bill did not have as its object the naturalization of English Jews. In fact, English-born Jews were, from the beginning, considered, and treated, as English subjects (here again was a striking contrast to conditions in some parts of the Continent), and they had all the rights of Englishmen except those from which other non-members of the Church of England, or non-Protestants, were excluded. Foreign Jews could enjoy the same rights once they were naturalized or “endenizened,” but this was a difficult and expensive process. The so-called “Jew Bill” was simply intended to facilitate and encourage this process, and those who availed themselves of it would merely have been put in the same position as their native-born children. After the repeal of the act, they had to rely again on the previous cumbersome method. Jewish naturalization hence has no bearing whatsoever on the question of Jewish Emancipation. Its repeal was a matter of political maneuvering, and it is extraordinary that notwithstanding the vast outpouring of inflammatory propaganda by the Opposition there was, so far as one can tell, no outbreak of violence.

A very similar Parliamentary measure had been passed as a matter of fact a few years before, without opposition, for the benefit of alien Jews in the American Colonies, whose settlement there it was hoped to encourage by this means. Not very much advantage was taken of it, but there was one notorious case which should be mentioned. Under its provisions, Aaron Lopez, the great merchant prince of Newport, together with another local Jew, applied for naturalization in 1761 to the Assembly of the Province of Rhode Island. They were however refused, on the basis of a local law of 1663 which provided that “no person who does not profess the Christian religion can be admitted free of this colony.” Here we have the traditional picture, of the contrast between the intolerance of the Mother Country and the tolerance of the Colonies, in reverse; there was a conflict as it were between the legislation of the English Parliament and that of the dependency, in which the latter showed up in the worse light, and this in a period in which quite apart from the provisions of the shortlived “Jew Bill,” many Jews were in fact being freely “endenizened” at Westminster. Lopez ultimately secured what he wanted in Massachusetts; it is interesting—I do not know whether it was significant—that this Colony had at the time no Jewish community.

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I do not wish to suggest that all was rosy with the Jews, at all times, in 18th-century England. There was more than a sufficiency of vulgar literary onslaughts. There were occasional unpleasantnesses, sometimes even physically expressed. Though no actual violence is recorded during the “Jew Bill” agitation (unless we should include the booing of a prominent Jew in the theater!) life must have been somewhat uncomfortable for Jews at this time. The bearded, uncouth Jewish peddlers sometimes went through unpleasant experiences. As the result of the discovery of the activities of a band of Jewish malefactors of an exceptionally unpleasant type in 1771, foreign Jews were mobbed in the streets. But all told, this did not add up to very much, and it was trivial as compared with the perpetual and acute physical discomfort which was at this time the lot of Continental Jewry. Moreover, the same sort of thing was not unknown in America. One of the New York papers in 1743 printed an account by an eyewitness of the disgraceful scenes at a Jewish burial when “such a Rabble was got together, it was with much Difficulty the Corpse was interr’d” and Christian formulas were apparently gabbled over the open grave. I do not recall having come across any similar episode in 18th-century England.

It would, of course, be absurd nevertheless to deny that it was easier for the Jew to become adjusted in the 18th century to the American climate than to that of the Mother Country. Obviously, in a new country there was not the same degree of social stratification in which it was difficult for a newcomer to find his place. Even in places where the official religion was that of the Church of England, there was not the same degree of uniformity or regimentation emphasizing the separateness of the Non-conformist; while elsewhere there was a variety of religious manifestation in which Judaism appeared only as a single eccentric and not particularly noteworthy facet. In a small, restricted society everyone was accepted on his personal merits: even fanatics could not afford to discard an interesting or informed companion simply on the score of his faith. In an expanding economy, there was opportunity of advancement for every man, without trespassing on his neighbors’ preserves. There was no conventional organization of commerce and industry which resented new faces and new methods. Hence the Jewish immigrant—like the non-Jewish, to be sure—was able to acclimatize himself more easily. But with these reservations, the English and American backgrounds were much the same. Benjamin Disraeli’s grandfather would never have gone back from London to live in his native Italy, where he would have been thrust back into the ghetto and compelled to wear the Jewish Badge of Shame. But the children of the Franks family of New York can hardly have noticed any difference in their circumstances when, at the same period, they were sent “home” to England for their education.

The foregoing pages have not, of course, taken into account all the social limitations and the inconveniences from which English Jews may have suffered at this time by reason of their faith. They could not, for example, enter universities. They could not therefore qualify as physicians (though if they qualified elsewhere—for example, in Scotland, where there were no difficulties—they were allowed to practice medicine). They were not admitted to practice at the Bar, though they could (and did) become solicitors. And there were various other restrictions and annoyances which complicated their lives. Nevertheless, none of these—and in fact no disabilities almost of any sort—were “anti-Semitic”: enforced against the Jews as Jews. No legislation whatsoever of this period was specifically directed against them; indeed, they were not mentioned in any Act of Parliament (save on the occasion of the repeal of the “Jew Bill”) except to confirm or to extend their rights. Whatever disabilities they suffered from were common to all those who did not conform to the Church of England. In the case of Non-conformists, they were perhaps somewhat less galling, and certainly easier to evade. In the case of Roman Catholics, on the other hand, they were more severe, and more strictly enforced by far. The formula which so long excluded the Jews from the House of Commons was originally framed, indeed, without any idea that it might ultimately operate against them. Similar religious restrictions against unpopular religious minorities prevailed, of course, in the 18th century in many parts of the American Colonies as well, and here, too, the Jews occasionally suffered incidentally as a result.

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The social emancipation which was part of the common heritage of the English-speaking world received its formal expression and completion on the establishment of American independence. The Constitution that the United States adopted in 1787 stipulated that no religious test should be required as qualification for any office or public trust. It was this, rather than the enactments in France a few years later, which set the tradition for Jewish Emancipation in the modern world. It is nevertheless desirable to remind the reader—even the American reader, perhaps—that this covered only positions under the Federal government. In some of the individual states, Emancipation lagged deplorably. Religious equality was embodied indeed in the constitution of the State of New York (1777) and Virginia established the fullest religious freedom in Jefferson’s famous Act of 1785. But in the constitution of North Carolina (1776) Jews and Catholics were specifically debarred from holding public office of any sort; and though in the case of the latter this restriction was soon overlooked, it was only with the greatest difficulty that Jacob Henry was able to take his seat in the legislature after his election in 1808/9, and the clause remained in operation until 1868. Emancipation did not become a fact in Maryland until 1825. In New Hampshire, Jews and Catholics were ineligible to hold certain offices until as late as 1876/7. By this time, English Jewry had been fully emancipated for almost a generation. It must be emphasized that the reason for the long delay in the formal completion of this process lay in the fact that the disabilities from which English Jews suffered were relatively so slight, being virtually confined by 1858 to their inability to sit in Parliament—a restriction which many persons regarded with complete indifference. A bald comparison of dates is, of course, misleading, and there is danger of reducing the whole argument to a quibble. But it is as erroneous to think of English Jewry as right-less until 1858 as it is to regard American Jewry as unemancipated until 1877. And I am not quite sure that the utilization of political rights—as apart from the possession of them—did not in fact make more rapid progress in England than it did in the United States. Certainly Jews in some number held high public office in England long before they did in the United States.

This essay has necessarily dealt thus far mainly with points of detail. But such treatment necessarily obscures something of the general picture, and especially its positive side. For the essential part of the social emancipation of the Jews in England as in America in pre-Revolutionary days did not lie in the fact that they overthrew this or that disability, or that they possessed this or that privilege, but in the general position they enjoyed in society. It was in this, rather than in minutiae of regulation here and there, that a new epoch in Jewish life was begun at this period in the countries of the North Atlantic seaboard—on both sides of it.

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In America, the process was possibly speeded by the smallness and newness of the society; in England, it may have been retarded by the great newly arrived mass of poor Jews from Central Europe; but in general terms the picture is the same. We find the Jews living in the very same streets as their Christian fellow townsmen, or in country houses in the same areas, and living lives which are basically identical. They dressed in the same fashion, they ate much the same dishes (even though the one might be based on ritually prepared food and retain nostalgic Continental reminiscences), they had similar households. They went to the same playhouses, they diverted themselves with the same sports, they read much the same books, they grumbled together at the government, they cheered or booed the royal family, they lost their money at the same gambling resorts, they passed the summer in the same watering places, they intermingled on equal terms.

Solomon da Costa Athias, the founder in 1761 of the Hebrew collection at the British Museum, was a rural philanthropist who played some part in the life of the countryside near his residence in Essex, and whose voice carried much weight with the landowners of the vicinity. The friendly relations between their neighbors and the Anglo-American Franks family, of Isleworth near London, caused some spiteful comment at the time of the “Jew Bill” agitation. Horace Walpole, the letter-writer, as half a dozen passages of his correspondence serve to show, intermingled freely at Twickenham with his Jewish neighbors—especially the Franks and Salvador families (the latter, too, with American connections) and the horticultural enthusiast Abraham Prado. Mrs. Judith Levy, “the Queen of Richmond Green,” who rebuilt the Great Synagogue in her extreme old age, towards the end of the century was a notable figure in society, playing at half-guinea quadrille with aristocratic cronies, including the Countess of Yarmouth, Lady Holderness, and Lord Stormont. The death of Moses Franks in 1789 left his close friend and neighbor, General Cowper, disconsolate. Sampson Gideon and Joseph Salvador advised British governments in questions of finance.

A Jew intrigued for the Old Pretender, and a Jew was executed for his part in the Gordon riots. Half a dozen persons of Jewish birth received the coveted honor of election to the Royal Society, of which the wayward Emanuel Mendes da Costa was Clerk. Solomon Mendes was a close friend of the poets Richard Savage and James Thomson (author of The Seasons) and in cordial correspondence with the publisher Robert Dodsley. It would not be difficult to assemble other instances of such familiar intercourse in the lower—indeed, the lowest—strata of society. It was this social emancipation which prepared the ground for (though indeed on the other hand it minimized the necessity of) political emancipation; and the examples collected here at random are assuredly sufficient to show that this was by no means a phenomenon restricted to the New World.

By and large, American Jewry, in its formative period in the 18th century, was simply a microcosm—and not relatively on a very minute scale—of English Jewry. We Jews of the Anglo-Saxon world are brought together not only by a common destiny and a common tongue, but also by a similar historical experience.

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