The Chosen Wars Read online

  A third and perhaps most American factor in how Judaism became an American religion was intellectual. Jews in America were educated in matters outside their religion. They had little choice but to come to grips with modern thought and the evolving revolutionary concepts of science, citizenship, anthropology, history, and literary analysis in an egalitarian democracy.

  Scientific discoveries since Galileo had long rendered obsolete the religious cosmology of the sun revolving around the Earth. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church in 1633, but change in religious thinking was inevitable. Jews who were accomplished in medicine, the arts, and physical sciences had begun to thirst for secular knowledge in this same era. Shortly after Galileo, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated in Amsterdam in 1656, for unspecified “heretical” views. Spinoza later made clear that he could not believe in a god that designated Jews alone as his “chosen people.” Going further, like some of the founders of America who were enlightened Christians, many American Jews felt they could no longer believe in a god who intervened daily in world affairs. They saw that stories of the Bible sometimes contradict each other or plain common sense. Whereas the prophets decreed that Jews were punished for their sins and rewarded for their virtue, the books of Ecclesiastes and Job teach the opposite, that reward and punishment are beyond human understanding. But it was discoveries in geology, paleontology, and archeology that shattered the literal foundation of the Bible beyond repair, just as Jewish populations proliferated in the United States. Although many Jews had always harbored skepticism toward biblical stories, it became impossible in the modern era for educated and uneducated alike to think that the Earth was six thousand years old or created in six days. Darwin’s works challenged to the core the story of humanity’s creation in Genesis.

  Along with the widening of physical and life sciences came changes in the science of history—the birth of historical relativism, or what is known as “historicism,” following the philosophy of Hegel that social norms are best understood as a product of a society’s historical context. In the late nineteenth century, the study of other religions in the ancient Near East—many of them with legends, rituals, and beliefs so similar to those of Judaism—led to the view of Judaism as a body of beliefs of a particular tribe in the region with its own God rivaling the gods of other tribes. Of course, the Bible itself makes clear that although “God is one,” other peoples of the region had rival gods that Jews were implored to reject. But scholarly explorations of these other sects, based on recovered artifacts, helped to ignite a passion for seeing Jewish history as a product of its time and place as well as an inspiration for universal truths.

  The study of religious traditions from other cultures, including Asia, also contributed to an intellectual awakening to the universal impulse toward faith. The Torah (or Pentateuch, i.e., the first five books of the Bible), was clearly written by several authors, according to the work of German scholars. How, after all, could the Torah have been handed down to Moses on Sinai if Deuteronomy vividly describes Moses’s own death and burial? Many of the founding accounts of Judaism, even the Exodus story, came to be seen as etiological myths, written to explain and justify the origins and uniqueness of Jewish claims to the land of Canaan, or Palestine. Scholars believed a history of the Jewish people that could be told without the legends and miracles of the Bible made it easier intellectually for Jews to adapt to modern cultures and demands.

  A PART BUT APART

  The historian Arnold Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, recounts a story of an itinerant peddler, Joseph Jonas, one of the first Jews to travel west of the Alleghenies, in 1817. A Quaker woman was excited to meet him. “Art thou a Jew?” she asked with wonder. “Thou art one of God’s chosen people.” But then upon inspection she expressed disappointment. “Well, thou art no different to other people.”5

  For American Jews, the idea of “chosenness” has always presented problems of how to identify themselves as a people “apart” but also a people as “a part” of America, accepted by Americans, like all other people. The Bible, Eisen notes, refers at least 175 times to the Jews as chosen by God to fulfill certain roles in their redemption. Jews are identified as a “special treasure” of God at Mount Sinai, for example. But it is not until the chapters of Isaiah—which scholars believe were written much later than the period of the prophet himself—that Jews are described as chosen to be what is often translated as “a light unto the nations.” The special status of Jews in these passages has evolved, especially among American adherents in the nineteenth century, but also among many others, into “an explicit mission” for Jews to become “the servant of mankind”—and even that Jewish suffering is proclaimed as evidence of “the mark of election” to carry out this task.6 As Judaism came to flourish in the United States, American Jews struggled with this paradox: that Jews saw themselves as commanded to dwell separately from humanity to serve a divine purpose, as a beacon to humankind, but also to be grateful that they could belong in their new land as equal to others.

  The growing acceptance of Jews by non-Jewish fellow citizens thus posed both a challenge and opportunity to integrate themselves in American society—while cherishing their separateness as a sacred mission. Many American Jews reconciled these two imperatives by redefining the nature of their history of Diaspora, or exile. They saw these punishments less as retribution for misdeeds committed in antiquity and more as a sacred assignment to disperse, proclaim justice, and set an example for a world in need of repair.

  For many Jews today, the embrace of a distinctively Jewish social gospel, akin perhaps to the social gospel of Christianity, is an important part of their faith. But it was through the process of Americanization that the social gospel entered American Judaism. Doing God’s work on Earth—a legacy of the Enlightenment, the Transcendental movement, the Second Great Awakening, Reform Judaism, and other intellectual strands in American history—is referred to by some American Jews today as tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), a distinctly modern phrase adapted and reinterpreted (indeed misinterpreted) from Jewish mystical writings. Some also use another contemporary term B’tselem Elohim (“in the image” of God), to describe the importance of treating all of humanity with compassion. But this task of religious believers tending to the secular world remains a contentious issue for Jews and non-Jews alike.

  What is beyond dispute is that Jews are heirs to a long and much-debated history on this and many other issues. How could it be otherwise? The Bible recounts many stories of Jews arguing with God—from Abraham to Jacob wrestling with the angel and changing his name to Israel (“contending with God”) to Job to the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jews willing to challenge God could not but share a history of challenging each other.

  But the story of the journey and all these disputes among American Jews begins with the landing of the first Jews in New York City more than 350 years ago.

  One

  COMING TO AMERICA

  The first Jews to arrive in the New World may well have been converts or secret Jews aboard one of Columbus’s ships that landed in 1492 on an island in the Bahamas that Columbus named San Salvador. Indeed, Columbus could have been one of these “hidden” Jews himself.1

  The year 1492 is also associated with a more catastrophic event for Jews, and Muslims as well: the horrific eradication of their life in Spain carried out under the decree of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who had united as king and queen to create a unified Spain in 1474. The Spanish Inquisition was a holocaust of torture and executions inspired by the Catholic Church and driven by the conviction that the Jews were infidels responsible for killing Christ. It was accompanied by spectacles of mass murder to entertain the populace, and it wiped out a community that had prospered peacefully, materially, culturally, and intellectually in Spain for hundreds of years. Portugal followed Spain and expelled its Jews or forcibly baptized them in following years. Those who converted or secretly maintained Je
wish rituals—the so-called conversos (sometimes called “New Christians”) or marranos (“pigs”)—were hardly spared the church’s cruel persecution.2

  The Spanish Inquisition also produced a vital new chapter in Jewish survival. From Iberia, Jews fled to France, England, Germany, North Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, eastward as far as what is today Iraq and Iran. A primary haven was the Netherlands, where the Jews’ capabilities at business and trade helped turn Holland into a world commercial and cultural power in the seventeenth century. The Jews in the Netherlands were not full citizens, but they still enjoyed many civil and economic rights, and they became investors in the Dutch East India and West India Companies and other enterprises that established footholds in North America.

  In 1630, Dutch forces took the Brazilian coastal city of Recife from their longtime enemy, the Portuguese. Dutch Jews then settled in Recife, establishing a community that included rabbis, a synagogue, and two Jewish schools. But the Portuguese took Recife back in 1654, and the Jews fled yet again—some to England (where they petitioned to be returned after the expulsion in 1290), some to the Caribbean, some to Amsterdam—and some, probably unintentionally, to New Amsterdam in North America.

  It was there that twenty-three Jewish asylum seekers sailed into New York Harbor aboard the French frigate Ste. Catherine in September of 1654. Their arrival in New Amsterdam was by some accounts accidental, after a storm-tossed voyage. Individual Jews had settled earlier in the area, but never before had a group come with the intention of seeking collective asylum and protection. Their appearance was hardly auspicious, in any case. Peter Stuyvesant, the despotic Dutch colonial governor, was imposing a series of edicts to accommodate a population growing rapidly from only one thousand at the beginning of the decade. He rerouted streets, established building codes, and banned citizens from throwing trash and dead animals into roads. The Jews had hardly set foot on the city’s shores when the captain went to a local court to sue his passengers for a payment he claimed they had not made, implying to Dutch authorities that, like it or not, this would be their last stop. Very quickly, however, the Jews established a synagogue congregation, Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), then as now following Spanish and Portuguese Jewish customs. An early task was locating a cemetery for Jews and bringing in the first Torah scroll from Amsterdam. For the next 171 years, Shearith Israel was to serve as the only Jewish congregation in the city. (It is now located at the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue on Central Park West.) 3

  All religious adherents in America are pilgrims in some sense. So argues Martin Marty in his book Pilgrims in Their Own Land, which asserts that no faith has ever felt “truly installed” in the United States. Escaping from imprisonment, slavery, debt, low status, poverty, and persecution, he contends, most immigrants were pilgrims when they arrived in America—“and pilgrims they have remained in their new land.”4

  But more than the followers of any other religion, Jews see themselves as escapees, strangers, as galut—the Hebrew term for uprooted and living in exile—or Diaspora, a theme that derives from the long narrative of Jewish history and literature. Yet like Odysseus, Jews in biblical literature always contemplate a return—and a redemption. The theme of exile abounds in the earliest biblical writings: the expulsion of Adam and Eve, God telling Abram (later Abraham) to leave his native land for Canaan, and the escape from famine to Egypt by Abraham’s descendants. Always on the move, the Jews took flight from slavery back to the Promised Land, along the way receiving a body of laws from God in Sinai. These historical memories are tattooed into the Jewish psyche. But the escape from persecution to Dutch territory in the New World in the seventeenth century was different. It led eventually to Jews accepting their existence in a new Promised Land, for which their arrival in New York marked the beginning of a struggle to belong.

  New York was hardly welcoming at the start. Stuyvesant, famous already for his wooden leg and authoritarian ways, made it clear that inhabitants had to adhere to the Dutch Reformed Church. Stuyvesant regarded the Jews as “a deceitful race” whose “abominable religion” worshipped “the feet of Mammon.”5 He tried to keep the Jews out altogether as “hateful enemies and blasphemers.”6 But to their defense came the West India Company and the Jews of the old country, noting that the refugees from Recife could help bring the prosperity Stuyvesant was trying to foster. Stuyvesant bowed to their wishes. The arrival and forced acceptance of the Jews, in turn, helped open the boundaries of tolerance for others, including Quakers, Lutherans, and Catholics.7 Still their rights remained limited, and they had to battle for the right to trade and practice religion publicly.

  The new clusters of Sephardic Jews in New Amsterdam were a cosmopolitan lot compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts back in Germany and Eastern Europe. They were heirs to a separate tradition of “port Jews,” the term for inhabitants of coastal areas of Europe and the Caribbean willing to keep their customs and worship private in order to thrive and be seen as equals to the Protestants and Catholics with whom they lived.

  Their accommodations of lifestyle and ancient Jewish practices to the new world in which they sought to do business had been influenced by years of exile, persecution, and the need to travel long distances. Disputes over longstanding Jewish identity, separateness, and traditional beliefs were already flaring in the Netherlands. In 1656, two years after the Recife Jews landed in America, traditional Jewish authorities in Holland excommunicated Baruch Spinoza for “evil opinions and acts,” “abominable heresies,” and “monstrous deeds.” It has never been clear what Spinoza had done by the age of twenty-three, with no published writings to his credit, to have outraged the Jewish establishment. But he later became a well-known rationalist philosopher and acquaintance of Descartes whose ideas continued to challenge the rabbinate. Spinoza not only disputed the Jews’ status as God’s chosen people, he challenged the veracity of the divine origin of the Jews’ sweeping code of behavior that believers understood as given by God on Mount Sinai. It would take two centuries for those ideas to become more mainstream.

  In New Amsterdam, the Jews were doing their best to maintain their religious identity and practices when a new challenge arose in 1664. That year a British fleet under the command of Colonel Richard Nicolls set out from Coney Island and seized control of the Dutch colony. He granted its inhabitants the rights of English colonists, including freedom of worship—but only for anyone who professed Christianity. That barrier did not last. It fell after 1700, leading to a further influx of Jews. By 1740, Parliament granted the Jews naturalization rights in the colonies. Still, Jews in all the British territories were encouraged to practice their rites unobtrusively.8

  In this incubated setting, Jews began to identify themselves as adherents of a unique religious faith, but nonetheless a faith like others in the New World. Their loyalties beyond their faith were to the larger community in which they lived. As a result, they prospered as merchants, traders, shopkeepers, artisans, doctors, and landowners, dealing comfortably and even intimately with non-Jews. In the countries from which they had emigrated, Jews had earlier prospered by employing their broad connections via cross-border letters of credit, bearer bonds, and other financial instruments. These were elements invented by Jews that contributed to the early European banking system. Paul Johnson, in his history of the Jews, regards the evolution of these instruments as a critical building block of modern capitalism. “For a race without a country, the world was a home,” he writes. “The further the market stretched, the greater were the opportunities.”9

  Bringing that talent to the New World, Jews traded throughout the colonies—in textiles, spices, jewels, rum, furs, and other goods, including slaves.10 They also traded with Indians, merchants in the Caribbean islands, and commercial centers in Europe, often furnishing supplies for armed forces. Their lives were hardly easy. Dangers arose from hazards on the roads and high seas, not least from pirates, privateers, and enemy warships.11 When fortune turned against them, they served time in debt
ors’ prison, from where they relied on the charity of more prosperous Jews. And from New York, they spread to Newport, Charleston, Savannah, Philadelphia, and Richmond. Estimates based on a 1790 census are that the American Jewish population numbered 1,300 to 1,500 in this period. The largest communities were New York and South Carolina, with the rest scattered in New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina.12 In all these places, they sought to maintain traditions while adjusting to lifestyle and business realities. Generally, they did not try to control what fellow Jews did in their business lives but instead confined their religious activities to their own spheres, respecting the Sabbath, worshipping in makeshift synagogues, and keeping Jewish dietary laws when possible.

  Other practices to which they adhered included circumcising their sons, the ancient sign of the covenant between God and the descendants of Israel, praying with their tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries), and their belief in the coming of a messiah to deliver Jews back to Zion. In 1769, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, a founder of Brown and later president of Yale, recounted that he saw Jews frightened by a thunderstorm opening their doors and windows and singing prayers for the Messiah to deliver them.13

  Stiles figured in another aspect of Jewish integration in colonial era society—the perils of acceptance and even love by non-Jews. As a prolific diarist and genuine philo-Semite, or “lover of Jews,” Stiles professed his admiration for the Hebrew race even while echoing the common Christian theme that the Jews did not understand their own Bible correctly. Later as president of Yale, he required instruction of Hebrew for its students. When Stiles’s friend, Aaron Lopez, one of the wealthiest Jews in America, died from a carriage accident in 1792, Stiles praised him but with a well-intentioned reservation. “He was my intimate Friend and Acquaintance!” the Yale president said. “Oh, how often have I wished that sincere pious and candid mind could have perceived the Evidence of Christianity, perceived the Truth as it is in Jesus Christ.”14 (It was a confession laden with irony. Lopez had arrived in New York in 1740 as a Catholic named Duarte but later adopted the name Aaron, had himself circumcised, and lived as an observant Jew.)15