With the curtain going up this month on the national celebration of the tercentenary of the coming of Jews to these shores, we present with pleasure this account by Oscar Handlin of the beginning chapter of Jewish experience in America, in which, as he tries to point out, the pattern was set that has molded American Jewish life—its unique spirit and its characteristic forms—down to this day. The tercentenary celebrations, so we understand, will celebrate America, and the freedom and opportunity enjoyed by Jews, as by all, in America, rather than the achievement or “contributions” of the group—though we may expect that the extent to which Jews have shared in the responsibilities and creative endeavors of the common society will be mentioned with proper pride. It is, then, a happy circumstance that we have this year from Dr. Handlin’s pen a new, authoritative American Jewish history, rendered in precisely this spirit. Titled Adventure in Freedom, it will be published by McGraw-Hill in September; the article here printed is the book’s opening chapter. (A second article, drawn from the book’s concluding chapter, will appear in these pages next month.)
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In its brief history, the struggling outpost of the Dutch West India Company on the Hudson had already seen many a curious sight. None was more curious, however, than the spectacle that greeted observers one day early in September 1654. Beating its way up the Bay had come the tiny bark St. Charles. As the vessel drifted to anchor at the foot of the island, its passengers could be seen eagerly waiting to touch land. When at last they descended, it was apparent that among them were twenty-three Jews.
Such folk were indeed a rarity in this corner of the New World. Through the tiny settlements that dotted the Atlantic Coast of North America, an occasional Jew may have drifted without leaving a trace of his presence in the record. But this was the first group to make its way to the lands that ultimately became the United States; and they established the first organized Jewish community in that region.
The new arrivals had come a long way. In the first instance, the road they had followed reached back to Brazil. Briefly, in that lush corner of South America, the twists of international colonial rivalry had made a place for the Jews. Until 1630 the territory had been a possession of the Portuguese who, like the Spaniards, had refused to permit heretics or unbelievers to enter their overseas dominions. Only for a single year, in 1624, while Holland held Bahia, had the Israelites been allowed to settle there openly. Then in 1630, Recife had fallen to the Dutch, more tolerant and willing to encourage the settlement of the Jews in their newly gained possession. While the Netherlands remained in control, the Jews prospered; a thriving community sprang into being in Recife and flourished for a quarter-century. Yet here, too, hopes of a permanent home were doomed to disappointment. With the reconquest of Recife by the Portuguese in 1654, it was no longer safe for Jews to remain. In flight from the new Brazilian order, the passengers of the St. Charles had come to New Amsterdam.
To Brazil, their road had led across the Atlantic from the Netherlands. In the Dutch provinces, the Jews had discovered a refuge. That thriving country, self-confident in the aftermath of its successful struggle for liberation against Spain, was well on the way to commercial and financial primacy in the Western world. There Jews were free to live in the 17th century, free to create healthy communities and to participate in the economic and cultural life of the growing nation.
The Jews of Holland had come mostly from Spain and Portugal. Amsterdam had now become a magnet that drew Jews also from Germany and the east. But the roots of the passengers on the St. Charles reached back to the Iberian peninsula; they continued for some time to refer to themselves as “of the Portuguese nation.” Landing on Manhattan, they were completing the last stage of the dissolution of the Sephardic culture of medieval Spain.
For centuries, the Jews of the Peninsula had displayed astonishing vigor. In a long golden age, they had given to Spain economic and political leadership and to Europe men of learning and science. With the growth of centralized royal authority and the consolidation of a national state in the 15th century, the world of Spanish Jewry had begun to dissolve. Restrictive measures pressed them to abandon their ancestral faith. Suspicion drove the Inquisition to violently repressive measures. Finally, by an ironic—almost providential—coincidence, in the very year of Columbus’s discovery of America, the Jews of Spain were expelled. A royal edict compelled them to leave unless they adopted Christianity.
Some chose as the lesser evil the appearance of conversion and adopted the outward forms of Christianity, although many Marranos remained secret adherents of Judaism. Some refused to yield even outwardly, and preferred to leave Spain altogether. In the next century and a half they drifted about the face of Europe. They wandered eastward to Italy and to Turkey. They moved northward, establishing themselves in the Netherlands, at Hamburg, around the Baltic, and later in England. Often experienced in business or possessors of professional skills, they contributed greatly to the societies that harbored them.
Yet they remained still strangers, with their grandiloquent Spanish names, seeking to reconstruct the forms of a life that had long since vanished. And a goodly number never managed to attain economic security, but were driven to still newer places in the quest for a home and opportunity. From this ultimate source the first trickle had flowed to North America in 1654.
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The twenty-three Jews who landed at New Amsterdam were unable to pay for their passage and were at once clapped into jail. The testy Governor Stuyvesant saw no need of such newcomers and required them “in a friendly way to depart.” But the Dutch West India Company, influenced by its Jewish stockholders, was more liberal and granted the strangers the rights of settlers “provided the poor among them” be no burden, “but be supported by their own nation.” They stayed, and in time found themselves a community. In time too, scattered handfuls of others like themselves added to their numbers. By the end of the century, they totaled perhaps a hundred.
After 1700, other groups of immigrants joined them, some still continuing the Sephardic migration, some drawn from other parts of Europe. By the middle of the 18th century there were some three hundred Jews in the city of New York.
Meanwhile other, lesser communities had come into being in Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Sprinklings of Jews were also scattered along the coast from Massachusetts south to Georgia. In all, perhaps two thousand of these people lived in the colonies that were to revolt in 1776. From these meager antecedents sprang the Jewish community that was to be the largest and most influential in the world.
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It was not likely, as they stepped ashore at New Amsterdam, that the passengers of the St. Charles imagined this would be any more permanent a home for them than the other ends of the earth they had already touched. This was the post of a trading company, not far different from others like it in the Caribbean and in South America or, for that matter, in Africa and Asia—a fortified place for the exchange of manufactured goods and native products.
To the south and north were similar plantations. On the Delaware River, the Swedes had for a time nurtured a little colony until the more powerful Dutch swallowed it up. In New England, British subjects had by now put on a sure footing the settlements in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Connecticut; and around Chesapeake Bay they were firmly established in Virginia and Maryland. Within the decade, the whole territory would be British, for the Hollanders were doomed to see New Netherland become Charles II’s Royal Province of New York. Before long there would be added the new British colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and the Jerseys.
However, not the changes of jurisdiction or sovereignty, but rather the transformation of its population, gave an exceptional character to this part of America. The early trading companies had discovered that they could not here, as in Mexico and India, simply deal with natives for the natural wealth of the place. What wealth this country boasted—tobacco, fish, furs—called for hands to draw it forth; and these hands could be supplied only by permanent settlers.
Natural conditions in the colonies therefore encouraged a large and growing population that had decisively cut itself off from its antecedents and resolved to build a new life in the New World. Some came voluntarily out of the ambition to become landowners, others were brought over as indentured servants, or kidnapped and captured. Still others migrated, as did the Puritans, the Quakers, and the German Pietistic sects, out of the desire to construct new kinds of societies in the open spaces of America. Mostly such people turned to agriculture, and spread settlement inward toward the wilderness.
Yet colonial farming was always dependent upon trade. Whether the product was one of the tropical staples—tobacco, rice, indigo—or whether it came from the diversified farms that produced wheat, meat, and fish, farming could yield a return only through the services of the merchants who found overseas markets. The trading communities of the cities remained, as they had been at the start, essential. And given the rapid growth of the colonies, there was room for all manner of outsiders to find places in commerce.
By the nature of their own background and of the situation they discovered in America, the colonial Jews were quick to take advantage of the opportunities of trade. Although a few wandered into the back country, or settled elsewhere upon the land, the bulk of them lived in the largest cities and were concerned with commerce. Experience, literacy, and family connections throughout the world more than compensated for lack of initial capital.
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Three illustrations clearly display the course of this development. Among the great merchants of Newport was Aaron Lopez. In 1752 he had come over from Lisbon, a Marrano, no doubt informed by his half-brother, already there, of the opportunities presented by the rising capital of Rhode Island. By dint of shrewd calculation and venturesome enterprise, he accumulated a moderate fortune, came to own his own ships, and managed a network of trading operations that extended along the whole Atlantic Coast and to the West Indies. Lopez’s interests drew him also into industry: he was quick to see the advantages in the manufacture of spermaceti candles and, with a group of other merchants, devised the first American trust in 1761. By the time he had his portrait painted he was not much different from any other colonial worthy; beneath his powdered wig, he looks placidly forth, a twinkle in his eyes, and the hint of a smile enlivening his smooth-shaven face.
Farther south, in New York, were the headquarters of the Franks family. The family fortune had been established early in the 18th century by Moses Levy, who came to the new city in 1702. His daughter Abigail married a young newcomer from England, Jacob Franks. Between 1730 and 1770 the family established an extensive shipping business that reached both to the continent of Europe and to the West Indies. During the intermittent wars between the French and English, the Franks were official purveyors to the Crown, and no doubt used that position to support their own economic affairs. By 1770 they had important branch offices in several American cities as well as in London and the West Indies, and maintained a constant correspondence that permitted them to take advantage of every fluctuation in the course of trade.
The career of Moses Lindo, for a time of Charleston, S. G, was somewhat different. He brought to that seaport not only unusual commercial abilities but also the technical skill that was the basis for the production of one of the colonies’ most important crops. Born in England, Lindo had been educated in London and by apprenticeship had become an expert in the use of dyes.
In 1748 the British government had offered a bounty to encourage the production in the colonies of indigo, a plant from which was derived the royal-blue dye so highly valued in the growing textile industry. In South Carolina, its cultivation proceeded very slowly in the next few years, hampered by the inability to establish a proper grading and marketing system. Lindo came to Charleston in 1756 charged with the mission to contract for a large part of the crop on behalf of English dyers. In the next few years he created the channels by which that product was enabled to flow freely back to the dyeing houses of London. Lindo became the official surveyor, or inspector, with the power to establish grades and to inspect all indigo destined for export. His skill and energy proved highly advantageous to the colony as a whole as well as to himself.
Whether merchants constituted an actual numerical majority of American Jews is difficult to tell. Humbler folk were, of course, less likely to attract public notice or to leave behind personal documents. Now and then there do appear, in the records of the 17th and 18th centuries, some Jews who “earn their living by manual labor.” Occasionally an artisan emerges from the obscurity to which history confines little people, and a butcher or a baker proves to have been Jewish. Better known were the skilled handicraftsmen, some of whom were fabricators of the precious metals. Thus Levy Simons, embroiderer, informed New Yorkers in an advertisement that he worked in gold and silver, as well as in silk, worsted, and lace; and Myer Myers for a time was president of the Silversmith’s Society of New York. Less numerous still were professional men. In Maryland, a Dr. Lombroso makes himself known in court proceedings; Samuel Nunez practices in Georgia; and a handful of physicians elsewhere ply their skills. But the numbers are few, and it is likely that some of these Jews also engaged in trade. In any event, all these people deferred to the merchants who took the lead in communities dominated by mercantile interests.
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Life in America thus seemed to Jews largely an extension of the life they had long led in the Old World. They had simply wandered to another corner of the globe where they expected, as in earlier migrations, to find a temporary resting place. As long as they were tolerated, they would make themselves useful in trade and otherwise. But they envisioned no decisive break between past and present.
For centuries in their European past, the Jews had existed as an enclave within a larger society. All about them was an active and variegated life in which other men tilled the soil or exercised artisan trades, were members of villages or guilds, and were communicants of an established church. From all those activities the Jews had been cut off. They had survived instead through confinement to a ghetto, the walls of which were restrictive, whether built of stone or of binding laws and customs.
Within the European ghetto the members of the community necessarily clung together. It was not a matter of choice, of belonging or not belonging; all Jews were identified as such by their birth and by the very conditions of their life. In the face of the hostile outer world, all within the walls felt responsible for one another’s actions. They accepted and supported a variety of organizations for control, aid, and service.
The European community was thus tightly knit. It exercised great power over its members, and its influence extended to every aspect of existence in the ghetto. As the kahal, or congregation, it conducted religious worship; but it also administered law and the educational, charitable, and social systems. Nor did it hesitate to regulate the private lives of those it governed. The congregation had power to tax its members, and behind its every pronouncement were the weightiest sanctions: excommunication, social ostracism, and in some times and places, the authority of the civil government. Its self-perpetuating officers, generally the wealthy, held substantial power.
The Jews of the New World attempted, as a matter of course, to re-establish such communities. They expected in their new places of sojourn to live together, to worship together, and to aid one another as they always had. But slow and uncertain growth delayed them; it took some forty years before the Jews were firmly enough settled in New York to found their first congregation. In the 18th century, other Jewish communities in other cities followed in establishing the traditional forms and organizations as soon as they were large enough. But the effort was only partially and temporarily successful. Time and again the congregations were driven to compromise and expediency. By 1770 they had decisively entered upon a process of change that would make their institutions altogether different from those of Europe.
In part, the disruption of the old communal life was due to the difficulties of the new environment. Nothing was available, nothing could be taken for granted. Not the buildings or the cemeteries, not the holy books or the teachers to interpret them, not the scrolls of Law or the ceremonial objects appropriate to festivals, not even the traditional lunar calendar. It required effort and determination to observe the complex requirements of tradition. Late in the 18th century, Aaron Lopez had to send from Newport to New York for a man competent to circumcise his son. Not many could afford to do the same.
Furthermore, among these people few were learned in the Law. Until well into the 19th century, there was not a single rabbi in the United States, and the laymen were rarely able to deal with the intricacies of the Law under these conditions. Occasionally they would write back for advice to the scholars of London or Amsterdam. What degrees of consanguinity made marriages invalid? What was the formula for divorce, the procedure for the reception of proselytes? The answers were slow in coming, or unclear, or simply not relevant. Most often, it seemed preferable to these practical businessmen to deal with each situation pragmatically as it arose.
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And the necessities of the situation in America invariably thrust the community toward change. The social environment of Europe had receded in the transatlantic crossing; and that of the New World called for altogether new forms of social organization. For one thing, the defensive stance against outsiders relaxed. After the initial unpleasantness with old Governor Stuyvesant, the Jews found themselves welcome and quickly made at home. Everywhere the logic of empty space was clear. As the Jews of Amsterdam pointed out to the West India Company, “Yonder land is extensive and spacious,” and the more loyal people occupied it, the more the colony would profit in taxes and trade. Many types of newcomers were encouraged to share in the tasks of settlement; among the many varieties of strangers, the Jews were no longer exceptional; everyone was to some extent different.
In some places they were actually treated with exceptional favor. In New England, for instance, they were very highly regarded as a group. The influence of the Old Testament and the popularity of Hebrew culture gave the Puritans a strong leaning toward the Jews. The lads whose studies at Harvard included Hebrew grew up to respect the people whose language it had been.
In addition, the Puritans assigned to the Jews a critical role in the drama of salvation. The Puritans were convinced that the Second Coming and the final Judgment of the world were imminent; that conviction had animated their migration to the New World. They knew by the articles of their faith that conversion of the Jews would precede and herald these providential events. In anticipation, it was certainly necessary to cherish these folk and to encourage their conversion. The Jews were a mystery, living evidence of the truth of the divine revelations, and destined to endure as such until the Millennium.
Puritan friendship was demonstrated as early as the 17th century. In 1670 a certain Jacob Lucena found himself in difficulty in Hartford. Arrested for loose and indecent behavior, he had been sentenced to prison. When the authorities ascertained his religious affiliation, they determined to show him what “favor” they could, “considering he is a Jew”; they commuted his sentence to a fine, and ultimately spared him even that.
A century later, similar favors were shown worthier objects. Judah Monis, in Cambridge, had had his Hebrew grammar published, and was appointed to teach at Harvard, where he received an honorary degree. In Newport, meanwhile, the minister, Ezra Stiles, had established a warm friendship with various Jews. Indeed, during the Revolution the serious suggestion was heard that Hebrew replace English as the official American language!
These favorable, receptive attitudes were new and unexpected; they permitted Jews to draw close to other Americans. Occasional intermarriages were evidence that the social distance between Jews and their fellow citizens was narrowing. More important was the growing similarity in style of life and attitudes. Like the other merchants of Newport, the Harts and Polocks had their own social club; and the synagogue of that town, the loveliest monument of early American Jewry, took the outward form of Georgian architecture that its designer, Peter Harrison, also gave to King’s Chapel and Christ Church.
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The result was an unprecedented institutional situation. In three vital respects the Jews discovered that altered circumstances made it difficult to maintain the community on this side of the Atlantic as it had been on the other. In America, they discovered, they were rapidly becoming the religious equals of other citizens. The contrast with the position as it still existed in Europe grew increasingly startling. In every part of the Old World, the Jews were set off as a separate, inferior, religious minority. From many countries, like Spain, they were excluded altogether. Elsewhere, as in France, they were permitted to live a recognized, though covert, existence, without rights and completely subject to the whims of the monarch. In England, where in the mid-18th century their position was at its best, they were allowed to lead a relatively stable existence, though subject to numerous discriminations. For all these Jews, tolerance was as yet a distant, ideal goal; at most, they hoped simply for the opportunity to lead their own religious life openly, without disabilities or discrimination. Nowhere was there the least expectation that their faith might ever be put on the same or on an equal footing with that established and supported by the government.
American practice, at the start, had been similar to that in Europe. In each colony an established church had been created by law, and dissent discouraged or stamped out. But practical conditions militated against the continuance of that order. The idea of establishment ran counter to the developing actuality: the diversity of the American population left no group a clear-cut majority throughout the continent; nor was any group everywhere a clear-cut inferior minority. The Puritan Congregationalists dominant in New England were elsewhere cast in the role of dissenters. The Quakers, once persecuted in Boston, now were in control in Pennsylvania. Catholics were only a tiny handful, although the proprietor of Maryland was himself a Catholic. Through the interior were scattered Presbyterians and Baptists, members of the Dutch Reformed Church and German sectarians. This profusion of faiths made the very concept of establishment anachronistic, although the letter of the law lagged behind actual practice. By a succession of easy steps, Judaism came to be viewed as simply one other among numerous forms of belief.
This new attitude began to evolve early. In 1649 Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of Maryland, anxious to make it possible for his fellow Catholics to live in the province, recognized that under any circumstances they would still be a minority subject to the Church of England. To give them what protection he could, he extended freedom of worship to all believers in the doctrine of the Trinity. Clearly he intended this as a liberalizing measure; yet that Jews or Unitarians might be left free to worship as they pleased occurred to no one. Some ten years later there appeared on the scene Dr. Jacob Lombroso, announcing he was a Jew and denying Jesus’ divinity. The law was plain, and under it the doctor was accused of blasphemy and brought to trial. Here he openly refused to retract the offensive statements. Nevertheless the court was unwilling to condemn him to the punishment the law prescribed. The case was put off and the prosecution never resumed. Lombroso lived on, a man of substance, and the law fell into disuse.
Elsewhere it was the same story. Religious freedom came rapidly and easily even without changes in the law. In 1685 the Jews of New York requested the privilege of maintaining public worship. After some scratching of learned legal heads, they were told the law forbade it. A few years later, they had built their synagogue, leaving the law to take care of its own adjustment. Indeed, in 1711 New York’s Jews were so secure in their own rights that they could be the benefactors of others; seven of them that year contributed to the fund for building Trinity Church.
By 1770, although some legal disabilities remained on the statute books, and although an established church still existed in some colonies, actual practice had far outrun those formal limitations. In effect, the Jews had attained complete religious freedom. The equality for which the Jews of Europe did not dare to dream had become a reality in America; and it would take only separation from Great Britain to confirm it in law.
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Attainment of civic equality was more complete still. In Europe many privileges were withheld from Jews. Entrance to some professions was sharply restricted; education in the universities was denied to them; and they were excluded from the practice of many trades, either by the municipal corporations or by the legally constituted guilds. A multitude of other restrictions also hedged them about. In some places, they could not contract marriages without the consent of the government.
The American colonies, on the other hand, were not bound by the ideal of a stratified, orderly life, with men assigned their places by law. Guilds did not exist in the European form, and in time trade everywhere in the colonies became free. The first comers to Manhattan had run headlong into Stuyvesant’s prejudices. But successively they acquired the privileges of engaging in wholesaling, of building houses, of being rid of discriminatory taxes, of enjoying general burgher rights, and of entering into retail and artisan trades.
In the 18th century the halls of learning that would remain closed to Jews for another century in England were opened to them in America. By 1770 a number of Jewish boys had already passed through college, and in that year the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University) announced that it would never restrict admission on the basis of religion. What had been unattainable privileges in the Old World had become a matter of course in the New. On the eve of the Revolution, the Jews of the country that was to become the United States had acquired what they enjoyed nowhere in Europe: complete civic equality.
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Most startling of all was the acquisition of political privilege. Nowhere in Europe did Jews participate in the control of government. Not only were the states of the Old World monarchies or aristocracies with power confined in the hands of a few, but the Jews as a group were cut off from all political activity by explicit restrictions. Much later, in the 19th century, even the wealth of a Rothschild would not permit a Jew to take the seat in the House of Commons to which he had been elected.
Yet in America the Jews promptly secured the full political rights of citizens. In New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlers had been unwilling to be “fellow soldiers” with Jews; such, after all, had not been the practice in Holland. But the determined protest of Asher Levy in 1655 earned him the right to stand guard like others. Early the Jews were allowed to vote and to hold elective office; in 1718 two were chosen constables in New York. In the 17th century as individuals they received the rights of denizens; and after 1740 an act of Parliament permitted them to be freely naturalized. By the time of the Revolution, the Jews shared without question the political privileges of other Americans.
A dramatic demonstration of political equality came in 1774. As the nation moved toward revolution, an election in South Carolina produced an unprecedented situation. Among those chosen members of the Provincial Congress that year was Francis Salvador, a Jewish planter born in England. His selection by a constituency in which there could have been but few Jews demonstrated the extent to which Americans had become willing to commit political authority to these people. Salvador would himself the fighting in the Revolution. But there was enduring significance to the position he briefly held.
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Therein lay the true importance of the Jewish colonial experience in North America. In their long history, the Jews had elsewhere reached a state of material well-being equal to that they enjoyed in the American colonies. Elsewhere, they had boasted of greater cultural achievements. But nowhere in their past was there precedent for the total equality extended to them in the American colonies. Now they were to be tested as never before by the privileges and responsibilities of freedom.
That very freedom and equality put a strain on the old communal institutions. The new conditions raised questions, pregnant with meaning. Here no man was a Jew because he had to be; here no one was subject to any restraints except those to which he voluntarily submitted. The congregation could not count on holding its members by a discipline imparted from without, but only by playing a meaningful part in their lives. To these new conditions, the growing community would adjust itself in the decades after 1770, as the Revolution and independence completed the process begun in the American colonial past. And the direction and effects of this adjustment would continue into the present.
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