The middle of the 17th century marked the end of the Renaissance. The new ideology that emerged in the post-Renaissance period -- as a result of what came to be known as the Enlightenment -- is an ideology that still permeates the Western world to a large extent. We have to understand this ideology and the Jewish people's relationship to it in order to make sense out of what happens next in Jewish history.

The Enlightenment (1650-1850) was a period of time characterized by breakthroughs in thinking which steered the world away from religion and more and more toward secularism, humanism, individualism, rationalism, and nationalism.

Of all of these, it was rationalism that more than any other concept defined the Enlightenment, which was also called the "Age of Reason."

In earlier installments, we spoke about how the Middle (Dark) Ages were dominated by the Church and were God-focused. Then came the Renaissance, a time that was man-focused with emphasis on the arts and classical knowledge. The Enlightenment expanded the man-focus even further. At this time the human mind, rational thought, and empirical sciences took center stage. It was an age with total focus on the individual.

Because of it, we would eventually see many positive ideas and institutions emerging: liberal democracy, the scientific revolution, industrialization. But this focus on man also led to ideological attacks against some of the fundamental institutions of the Western world, including religion. Religion was viewed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment as an intellectual failing which was displaced by the ability of science to explain the unexplainable. Thus, a secular culture began to emerge as a very strong alternative to religion. The idea of a world without God took root in the Western world with big implications for Europe and the Jewish people.

As odd as it may sound, the less religious the Western world became, the better it treated the Jews. Christian fanatics killed Jews for various reasons as we have seen; the secularists, on the other hand, would do no such thing because the fact that a person was of a different religion did not matter to them. (What did matter more in this period was national, rather than religious identity.)

In tandem with secularism, the Enlightenment popularized the concept of individualism - each individual was valued and important, and along with this came an increased emphasis on civil rights.

On the surface, the emphasis on civil rights was good for the Jews. For the first time, the Western world started to look at the Jew as a human being. Edicts of toleration were issued, granting Jews certain basic (even if not equal) rights.

However, the problems with these ideas would surface and Jews would again be the victims.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE

The world without a God-given standard gets itself in trouble sooner or later.

Judaism believes that for an ideal world there must be a focus on both God and man. Because without a focus on God, all moral values become relative. Why is this bad? Well, for a while it might be nice to have respect for civil rights, but when it becomes convenient or necessary (for various social or political reasons) to change that focus, then respect for human life becomes just another idea that goes out of style. God-given values are immutable and can never go out of style. That's a big difference.

This big difference explains how a key figure of the French Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau - the author of the Social Contract who espoused that human beings are equal - could have been so inhuman to his own children. Rousseau impregnated his young laundress five times and each time forced her to drop the newborn on the doorstep of an orphanage, the Hopital des Enfants-trouves. This was an orphanage he himself had written about, noting that two-thirds of the babies there die within a year, and most of those that survive don't make it past age 7. His lofty ideas did not prevent him from practicing a modern version of infanticide. (See The Intellectuals by Paul Johnson, pp. 21-22.)

Likewise, all the talk of equality of man did not stop Francoise Voltaire from spewing out in his Dictionnaire Philosophique vicious anti-Semitic diatribes and singling out the Jews as "the most abominable people in the world." Although he did state that Jews ought not to be killed, he cannot contain his hatred:

"In short we find them only ignorant and barbarous people with long united and most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred of every people by whom they are tolerated..."

In contrast to France, the situation was very different in England (where the Puritan Revolution had a big influence) and in the New World, where again the Puritans figured prominently. The American Revolution came about as a result of the synthesis of very religious Bible-based ideas brought over by the pilgrims and the humanist ideas (such as "the inalienable rights of man") advanced by John Locke. We see this clearly in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The French Revolution did not have this synthesis. It was purely a secular movement. And there the problems with the philosophy of the Enlightenment became very apparent.

The French reformers, after executing the king and queen, Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, by guillotine, unleashed the Reign of Terror, during which time 25,000 "counter-revolutionaries" were executed in a similarly bloody manner.

The Reign of Terror for all practical purposes brought to end the Age of Reason. The bloody brutality of the masses shocked the world and severely tested the Enlightenment's belief that man could govern himself. A period of general unrest followed in France, marked by corruption and runaway inflation. All of it crashed when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in a coup d'etat of 1804.

NAPOLEON AND THE JEWS

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), a Corsican lieutenant, had himself crowned Emperor of France. During the ten years he held onto power, he embarked on a series of conquests where were unprecedented in terms of his rapid advance through Europe. A military genius, he took France on the offensive against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, against the Italians, against the Russians. And he almost beat all of them, becoming the master of the Continent and rearranging the whole map of Europe.

(What brought him down was the Russian winter, and once other European countries saw that he was vulnerable, they joined together and defeated him first at Leipzig in 1813 and finally at Waterloo in 1815. Exiled as a prisoner of war to the island of Saint Helena, he died there of cancer in 1821.)

As Napoleon marched through Europe, he liberated all the Jews from their ghettos. The idea of liberating the Jews and granting them civil rights had preceded him, but he really pushed it forward.

Napoleon was fascinated with the Jews, although he did not understand them. He wanted them to be accepted by the rest of European society, and he thought that they were not because they were different -- if only they could become more like others, people would accept them. So, he set about to help the Jews rid themselves of the things that set them apart. He advocated, for example, that one-third of all Jews must intermarry with non-Jews.

Historian Berel Wein in his Triumph of Survival states that Napoleon was not the Judeophile that many Jews initially thought he was. Wein writes:

"Napoleon's outward tolerance and fairness toward Jews was actually based upon his grand plan to have them disappear entirely by means of total assimilation, intermarriage, and conversion."

Twice, in 1806 and in 1807, Napoleon convened gatherings of prominent Jewish leaders to promote his platform for "saving" the Jews. These religious leaders were astonished. On the one hand, they wanted to cooperate with Napoleon and make life easier for the Jews of Europe. On the other hand, they could not possibly acquiesce to some of Napoleon's ridiculous ideas which would have meant the destruction of Judaism. They answered him as diplomatically as possible, while sticking to Jewish law.

(For more on this subject see The Jew in the Modern World by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, pp. 112-132, and Triumph of Survival by Berel Wein, pp. 69-77.)

Although Napoleon lost his wars in the end and ended up in exile, the things he put in motion had a huge ripple effect. By the end of the 19th century the notion of keeping Jews as non-citizens was no longer tenable in the more liberal environment in Europe.

With time, Jews were granted citizenship in every country in Europe. Interestingly, the last two countries to grant Jews citizenship were Switzerland (1874) and Spain (1918).

This meant that by the late 19th century, Jews - who had been economically and physically marginalized, who had been locked out of any trades and professions - now were allowed (if not exactly welcomed) into all phases of European society.

Does that mean that the Enlightenment put an end to anti-Semitism?

Hardly.

It merely intellectualized it.

THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM

Once the gates of the ghettos were thrown open, the Jews rose to the top quickly, gaining prominence and wealth. This doesn't mean that, despite their achievement, they were accepted into general society. The times had changed, but not that much.

It is true that in Western Europe in the 19th century, there were no pogroms against the Jews. The post-Enlightenment society did not do things like that. Not in Western Europe anyway. (We will talk about Eastern Europe and particularly Russia in a future installment.)

But just because there were no pogroms doesn't mean that the non-Jews suddenly began to love the Jews.

The new anti-Semitism of this time can be called "intellectual anti-Semitism."

What that means is that people like Baron Lionel Rothschild - one of the most prominent and richest Jews in England - could not take a seat in the British Parliament after his election in 1847 because he refused to take an oath on the Christian Bible. It took eleven years and the passing of the "Jewish Disabilities Act" for him to have that right. (He became the first Jewish member of the British Parliament in 1858.)

Benjamin Disraeli, who was twice the Prime Minister of England during the reign of Queen Victoria, was able to achieve that position because his family converted to the Church of England.

So, yes, Jews were accepted into society as long as they were not too Jewish. If a Jew was willing to twist himself into taking an oath on the Christian Bible, or better yet, eschewing his religion, he was tolerated. If he insisted on being true to the Torah and the Hebrew Bible, he was told to stay out.

(In the next installment, we will examine one attempt of the Jews of Germany to get around this problem when we look at the beginnings of the Reform Movement within Judaism.)

It is interesting to note that in this time of unpredented toleration the term "anti-Semitism" was first coined. It was the product of one of German's biggest thinkers of the 19th century -- Wilhelm Marr - who wanted to distinguish hatred of the Jews as members of a religion (anti-Judaism) from hatred of the Jews as members of a race/nation (anti-Semitism). In 1879, he wrote a book called The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, which went into twelve printings in six years - it was a runaway best-seller.

Another important thinker was Karl Eugen Duehring who in 1881 wrote The Question of the Jew is a Question of Race, summed up what anti-Semitism meant:

"The Jewish question would still exist even if every Jew were to turn his back on his religion and join one of our major churches. Yes, I maintain that in that case the struggle between us and the Jews would make itself felt even more urgent. It is precisely the baptized Jew who infiltrates furthermost, unhindered in all sectors of society and political life. I return, therefore, to the hypothesis that the Jews are to be defined solely on the basis of race and not on the basis of religion."

Jews who were dropping their religion and rising to power, wealth and prominence did not pay enough attention to these ideas. If they did, they would have realized that their joy-ride was going to be a short one. Because even if Jews escaped anti-Judaism by becoming Christian, or secular, or even if they refashioned themselves to blend in, "anti-Semitism" -- which didn't care what they believed or how they behaved as long as they were Jews -- would get them in the end.

NEXT: THE REFORM MOVEMENT

As we saw in the last installment, the Enlightenment gave Jews new rights -- human rights and citizenship rights -- which they never had before. The new broad-mindedness went so far that Jews were even accepted into society as long as they were not "too Jewish" -- as long as they didn't dress too differently, behave too differently, eat a different diet, or insist on wearing their "old-fashioned" religion on their sleeve.

The reaction to this from some Jews was a staunch refusal to cooperate and get with the plan -- in any way, shape or form -- which is why you see Chassidim to this day wearing the garb common to 18th century Eastern Europe.

But there was also the opposite reaction from others. These Jews went along with the spirit of liberation and modernity and dropped the things that had made them different from other people -- such as keeping kosher, keeping Shabbat, etc.

Of course, as soon as Jews drop their religion, they begin to assimilate. And this is what happened in huge numbers. Just how many we don't know. What we do know is that an estimated quarter of a million Jews converted to Christianity during this time and that countless others assimilated into the European culture.

Interestingly, the assimilation rate was higher where there were fewer Jews. In Eastern Europe, where the Jewish population was almost 5 million, 90,000 (or not quite 2%) converted to Christianity in order to have an easier life and mingle with mainstream society. But in Western Europe where there were fewer Jews, the proportions were much higher. The majority of the Jews of France assimilated, as did the majority of the Jews of Italy and Germany.

Why? Because in Western Europe, the non-Jews were much nicer to Jews and the attraction to join the mainstream was much greater.

Some Jewish converts to Christianity were very famous. In Part 53, we already mentioned Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister who became the great architect of Victorian imperialism. But we must also mention Karl Marx, the father of Communism.

Marx was converted by his father at age six; the father himself had converted a few years earlier in order to be able to practice law. Marx, who eventually became an atheist, is the author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, ironically called the "Bible of the Worker." He is also famous for calling religion "the opiate of the masses."

A terrible example of a self-hating Jew, Marx blamed all the world problems on the Jews in his rage-filled A World Without Jews. Virulent hatred of Judaism and other Jews was not uncommon to such converts. It infected, among others, Heinrich Heine, one of the greatest figures in 19th century German literature.

Heine converted, as did so many, for pragmatic reasons, explaining his conversion: "From the nature of my thinking you can determine that baptism is a matter of indifference to me and I do not regard it as important even symbolically. My becoming a Christian is the ticket of admission to European culture." He was as cynical about Judaism, declaring it one of the world's three greatest evils (along with poverty and pain.)

GERMAN REFORM

Perhaps the most unusual reaction to the changes of this time period came from a group of German Jews who formed what came to be known as the "Reform Movement."

The German Jews who began the Reform Movement in the early 1800s wanted to stay Jewish, but at the same time wanted to take advantage of the newly-won rights and freedoms, which were available only if one became a full-fledged member of European society. Traditional Jewish lifestyle and national identity were barriers to this aculturation. So these German Jews set about dropping some key aspects of traditional Judaism. The most dramatic of these was the belief that the Torah was given to Jews by God at Mount Sinai.

For 3,000 years Jews never questioned that the Torah came from God. The various sects that developed -- such as the Sadducees and the Karaites -- questioned the oral tradition or rabbinic law, but never the Divine origin of the Torah. This was an earth-shattering precedent.

The first break in the dam came from Moses Mendelssohn (1724-1804), a brilliant thinker who was known as the "hunchback philosopher." He advocated the "rational" approach to religion, as he wrote in his Judaism as Revealed Legislation:

"Religious doctrines and propositions ... are not forced upon the faith of a nation under the threatof eternal or temporal punishment but in accordance with the nature and evidence of eternal truths recommended to rational acknowledgment. The Supreme Being has revealed them to all rational creatures."

In effect, Mendelssohn was following the pattern of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the "Age of Reason." Religion should be rational. If the law of God seems irrational, then man must follow reason.

By opening up Judaism to this kind of rational skepticism, Mendelssohn opened the door through which others rushed in.

This is not to suggest that before him Judaism was closed to skepticism. Indeed, being skeptical was always a big part of Judaism, but that skepticism was grounded in certain beliefs and assumptions, which in the Reform Movement came tumbling down.

The first Reform service was conducted by Israel Jacobson in his school chapel in Seesen, Germany in 1810, and it was adopted by the first Reform synagogue which opened in Hamburg in 1818.

The Reform service had a choir, robes, and an organ; it was conducted in German with German songs and German prayers in a deliberate attempt to emphasize nationalistic loyalty and identity.

Jewishly, however, this was quite a departure. Up until then, Jews prayed in Hebrew, reciting the prayers composed by the Men of the Great Assembly and by the Sanhedrin some two thousand years earlier. Jews never played musical instruments during Shabbat services, and certainly not an organ which was an instrument common to Christian churches, as was the choir and the robes.

Not long after, the Reform Movement switched Shabbat from Jewish Saturday to Christian Sunday, and came to call its synagogues "temples" to underscore the point that Reform Jews no longer looked to the rebuilding of "The Temple" in Jerusalem.

In fact, Reform leader Samuel Holdheim (1806-1860), who became the head of the Reform congregation in Berlin, argued against the mention of Jerusalem, Zion, or the land of Israel during services. He opposed circumcision, wearing of skull caps or prayer shawls, or the blowing of the shofar -- in short just about anything traditionally Jewish.

Another Reform leader Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), who led reform groups in Breslau, Frankfurt and Berlin, called circumcision "a barbaric act of blood-letting rite" and advocated against "the automatic assumption of solidarity with Jews everywhere."

These were big breaks with tradition. Ever since Abraham, circumcision was the way Jews marked their covenant with God. And Jews helping each other in times of trouble -- one for all and all for one -- was seen as an integral part of Jewish nature as defined by God (see Part 14).

Reformers of Germany declared that they were not members of the nation of Israel but "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion."

The philosophy of the German Reform Movement evolved further at conferences held in Brunswick in 1844 and in Frankfurt in 1845. Here are excerpts that show how much the Jews of Germany wanted to show their allegiance to their country of residence, which meant disavowing any allegiance the Land of Israel or the Hebrew language:

(For more on this subject, see History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, pp. 333-335, and Triumph of Survival by Berel Wein pp. 52-53, and The Jew in the Modern World ed. by Paul Medes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz pp. 161-177.)

THE ORTHODOX

Along the way, the members of Reform Movement coined a new term to describe those who stuck to traditional Judaism -- they called them the "Orthodox."

In places where the Reform Movement succeeded in attracting the majority of Jews, it did its best to force its agenda on the minority. In Frankfurt, for example, the mikvah (the ritual pool) was closed, kosher slaughter was banned, the teaching of Torah was forbidden. The Orthodox Jews were basically run out of town.

Why?

The German Reformers were afraid that while they might be able to assimilate into the larger German culture, as long as there continued to exist a group of Jews who chose to act as Jews and openly identify as such -- that is, Jews who irked the Germans -- then the Germans would lump everyone together and continue to be hostile toward them as well.

But of course the Jews who would not go along with the Reform Movement weren't about to take all this sitting down.

The leader of the Orthodox counter-attack against the Reform Movement was a rabbi by the name of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808 to 1888). Born in Hamburg and educated at the University of Bonn, he was the chief rabbi of Moravia, a community of 50,000 Jews.

In 1851 he moved to Frankfurt (where there were only 100 Orthodox families left) to wage the philosophical war against the Reform bans there.

As part of his fight he succeeded in setting up his own Orthodox institution in Frankfurt which is called the Kahal Adas Yeshurin, and he created his own religious school system.

His aim was to show those Jews who wanted to be modern that it was possible -- all within the context of traditional Judaism. There is no need to drop Torah in order to get along in an evolving world as the Torah makes provisions for all that. This is what he wrote in 1854 in an article entitled, "Religion Allied to Progress" (see Collected Writings of Samson Raphael Hirsh):

"Now what is it that we want? Are the only alternatives either to abandon religion or to renounce all progress? We declare before heaven and earth that if our religion demanded that we should renounce what is called civilization and progress we would obey unquestioningly, because our religion is for us the word of God before which every other consideration has to give way. There is, however, no such dilemma. Judaism never remained aloof from true civilization and progress. In almost every area its adherents were fully abreast of contemporary learning and very often excelled their contemporaries. An excellent thing is the study of Torah combined with the ways of the world."

What Rabbi Hirsch emphasized was that the normal Jewish way to be is to be fully in the world but also to be fully immersed in Torah. It is not a question of "either Torah or the World" - it's a question of priorities. He made it very clear that the first priority is Torah. In contrast to Mendelssohn, he said that even if you didn't understand some part of the Torah, you had to follow it anyway because it is the word of God.

(For more on this subject see Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch: Architect of Torah Judaism for the Modern World by Elijahu Meir Klugman.)

Despite the efforts of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and others, the Reform Movement spread, not just inside Germany but to other countries as well, though each group of Reformers had its own take on it. For example, the Reform Jews of England in the West London Synagogue adopted a quasi-Karaite position. They stuck to the Torah as the word of God, but rejected the teachings of the Talmud.

In America, the Reform Movement also took on its special character after it was transplanted there from Germany by several hundred thousand German immigrants in the mid-19th century. We will take a look at it when we take up the Jewish life in America.

NEXT: JEWS AND THE FOUNDING OF AMERICA

The creation of the United States of America represented a unique event in world history -- it was a democracy from its inception, it was rooted in the Bible, and one of its earliest tenets was religious tolerance.

This is because many of the earliest pilgrims who settled the "New England" of America in early 17th century were Puritan refugees escaping religious persecutions in Europe.

These Puritans viewed their emigration from England as a virtual re-enactment of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. To them, England was Egypt, the king was Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea, America was the Land of Israel, and the Indians were the ancient Canaanites. They were the new Israelites, entering into a new covenant with God in a new Promised Land.

Thanksgiving -- first celebrated in 1621, a year after the Mayflower landed -- was initially conceived as a day parallel to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; it was to be a day of fasting, introspection and prayer.

Writes Gabriel Sivan in The Bible and Civilization (p. 236):

"No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation ... these emigre Puritans dramatized their own situation as the righteous remnant of the Church corrupted by the 'Babylonian woe,' and saw themselves as instruments of Divine Providence, a people chosen to build their new commonwealth on the Covenant entered into at Mount Sinai."

Previously, during the Puritan Revolution in England, (1642-1648) the Puritan extremists sought to replace English common law with Biblical laws of the Old Testament, but were prevented from doing so. In America, however, there was far more freedom to experiment with the use of Biblical law in the legal codes of the colonies and this was exactly what these early colonists set out to do.

The earliest legislation of the colonies of New England was all determined by Scripture. At the first assembly of New Haven in 1639, John Davenport clearly stated the primacy of the Bible as the legal and moral foundation of the colony:

"Scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of all men in all duties which they are to perform to God and men as well as in the government of families and commonwealth as in matters of the Church ... the Word of God shall be the only rule to be attended unto in organizing the affairs of government in this plantation."

Subsequently, the New Haven legislators adopted a legal code -- the Code of 1655 -- which contained some 79 statutes, half of which contained Biblical references, virtually all from the Hebrew Bible. The Plymouth Colony had a similar law code as did the Massachusetts assembly, which, in 1641 adopted the so-called "Capitall Lawes of New England" based almost entirely on Mosaic law.

Of course, without a Jewish Oral Tradition, which helped the Jews understand the Bible, the Puritans were left to their own devices and tended toward a literal interpretation. This led in some instances to a stricter, more fundamentalist observance than Judaism had ever seen.

JEWISH INFLUENCE ON EDUCATION

The Hebrew Bible also played a central role in the founding of various educational institutions including Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, Rutgers, Princeton, Brown, Kings College (later to be known as Columbia), Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth etc.

Many of these colleges even adopted some Hebrew word or phrase as part of their official emblem or seal. Beneath the banner containing the Latin "Lux et Veritas," the Yale seal shows an open book with the Hebrew "Urim V'Timum," which was a part of the breastplate of the High Priest in the days of the Temple. The Columbia seal has the Hebrew name for God at the top center, with the Hebrew name for one of the angels on a banner toward the middle. Dartmouth uses the Hebrew words meaning "God Almighty" in a triangle in the upper center of its seal.

So popular was the Hebrew Language in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that several students at Yale delivered their commencement orations in Hebrew. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania taught courses in Hebrew - all the more remarkable because no university in England at the time offered it. (In America, Bible study and Hebrew were course requirements in virtually all these colleges and students had the option of delivering commencement speeches in either Hebrew, Latin or Greek.)

Many of the population, including a significant number of the Founding Fathers of America, were products of these American Universities - for example, Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary, James Madison Princeton, Alexander Hamilton King's College (i.e. Columbia). Thus, we can be sure that a majority of these political leaders were not only well acquainted with the contents of both the New and Old Testaments, but also had some working knowledge of Hebrew.

Notes Abraham Katsch in The Biblical Heritage of American Democracy (p. 70):

"At the time of the American Revolution, the interest in the knowledge of Hebrew was so widespread as to allow the circulation of the story that 'certain members of Congress proposed that the use of English be formally prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew substituted for it.'"

JEWISH SYMBOLISM IN AMERICA

Their Biblical education colored the American founders' attitude toward not only religion and ethics, but most significantly, politics. We see them adopting the biblical motifs of the Puritans for political reasons. For example, the struggle of the ancient Hebrews against the wicked Pharaoh came to embody the struggle of the colonists against English tyranny. Numerous examples can be found which clearly illustrate to what a significant extent the political struggles of the colonies were identified with the ancient Hebrews.

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Whereas, these words echo the ideas of the Enlightenment (see Part 53), without a doubt, the concept that these rights come from God is of Biblical origin.

This and the other documents of early America make it clear that the concept of a God-given standard of morality is a central pillar of American democracy. Even the currency of the new democracy proclaimed: "In God We Trust."

Many more things can be said about the Jewish influence on the values of America, but this is, after all, a crash course. We next turn to the Jews themselves.

EARLY AMERICAN JEWS

The history of Jews in America begins before the United States was an independent country.

The first Jews arrived in America with Columbus in 1492, and we also know that Jews newly-converted to Christianity were among the first Spaniards to arrive in Mexico with Conquistador Hernando Cortez in 1519.

In fact, so many Jewish conversos came to Mexico that the Spanish made a rule precluding anyone who could not prove Catholic ancestry for four generations back from migrating there. Needless to say, the Inquisition soon followed to make sure these Jewish conversos were not really heretics, and burnings at the stake became a regular feature of life in Mexico City.

As for North America, the recorded Jewish history there begins in 1654 with the arrival in New Amsterdam (later to be known as New York) of 23 Jewish refugees from Recife, Brazil (where the Dutch had just lost their possessions to the Portuguese). New Amsterdam was also a Dutch possession, but the governor Peter Stuyvesant did not want them there. Writes Arthur Hertzberg in The Jews in America (p. 21):

"Two weeks after they landed, Stuyvesant heard the complaint from the local merchants and from the Church that 'the Jews who had arrived would nearly all like to remain here.' Stuyvesant decided to chase them out. Using the usual formulas of religious invective -- he called the Jews 'repugnant,' 'deceitful,' and 'enemies and blasphemers of Christ' - Stuyvesant recommended to his directors ... 'to require them in a friendly way to depart.'"

The only reasons the Jews were not turned out was that the Dutch West Indian Company, which was heavily depended on Jewish investments, blocked it.

JEWS AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

By 1776 and the War of Independence, there were an estimated 2,000 Jews (men, women and children) living in America, yet their contribution to the cause was significant. For example, in Charleston, South Carolina, almost every adult Jewish male fought on the side of freedom. In Georgia, the first patriot to be killed was a Jew (Francis Salvador). And additionally, the Jews provided significant financing for the patriots.

The most important of the financiers was Haym Salomon who lent a great deal of money to the Continental Congress. In the last days of the war, Salomon advanced the American government $200,000. He was never paid back and died bankrupt.

President George Washington remembered the Jewish contribution when the first synagogue opened in Newport, Rhode Island in 1790. (It was called the Touro Synagogue and it was Sephardi.) He sent this letter, dated August 17, 1790:

"May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants. While everyone shall sit safely under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Note the reference to the "vine and fig-tree." That unique phrase is a reference to the words of Prophet Michah prophesying the Messianic utopia:

But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow to it. And many nations shall come, and say, 'Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for Torah shall go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.' And he shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide concerning far away strong nations; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken it.

This was an interesting choice of words on the part of Washington, but, as noted above, it is not surprising in light of the enormous influence that the Hebrew Bible had had on the pilgrims and on the founding fathers of the new nation.

AMERICAN AMBIVALENCE TOWARD THE JEWS

It must be noted however that some of the other founding fathers were a bit more ambivalent about the Jews than was Washington.

John Adams, who said some highly complimentary things about the Jews, also noted that "it is very hard work to love most of them [the Jews]. And he looked forward to the day when "the asperities and peculiarities of their character" would be worn away and they would become "liberal Unitarian Christians."

Thomas Jefferson thought Jews needed more secular learning so that "they will become equal object of respect and favor," implying that without such learning they could not expect to be respected. Writes Arthur Hertzberg in The Jews in America (p. 87):

"Jefferson was thus expressing the view of the mainstream of the Enlightenment, that all men could attain equal place in society, but the 'entrance fee' was that they should adopt the ways and the outlook of the 'enlightened.' Jefferson did not consider that a Yiddish-speaking Jew who knew the Talmud was equal in usefulness to society with a classically trained thinker like himself."

This idea that there was freedom for you in America as long as you were not "too Jewish," kept most Jews away. Until 1820, the Jewish population of America was only about 6,000!

This changed in the 1830s when Reform German Jews, who had scrapped traditional Judaism and were not "too Jewish," began to arrive. The great migrations of poor, oppressed Jews from Eastern Europe would follow near the turn of the century. But before we take up that story, we must look to see what is happening to the Jews of Europe.

NEXT: THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT