The Chosen Wars Read online

  As Stiles’s diary attests, Jews in the colonies generally did interact with Christians, visiting them in their homes and going ahead with intermarriage, by one estimate affecting 15 percent of Jews in the colonial era. Intermarriage was almost always a prelude to falling away from the faith, a frightening prospect to many in the community. Some families disowned their daughters and sons who married non-Jews. Others were more accepting. But the colonial years pointed to intermarriage as one of the first big issues that proved divisive within the community of American Jews.16

  Congregation of Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia, established in 1740 when Jews applied for a cemetery plot to Thomas Penn, was one of the earliest of its kind in the colonial era. But shortly after its founding, members of the congregation complained to a visiting chief rabbi of Amsterdam that one of their leaders in Philadelphia had performed a marriage ceremony for his niece, though she was married to a non-Jew, and that he gave last rites for another Jew who had married outside the faith. The dissident who performed these rites, Mordecai M. Mordecai, said it was his right to interpret the law as best he could. The congregation members disagreed with his use of “erroneous legalistic loopholes” and sought to bar him from the synagogue.17

  Another case, that of Jacob Franks, a shipowner, businessman, and merchant who served as an agent of King George III in the French and Indian War, illustrated the stresses on each family. Franks and his wife, the former Abigail Levy, had emigrated from London. Though British, he was a Jew of Ashkenazic or Germanic origin. He had lived as a boarder in the Levy household and married Abigail when she was only sixteen. They had nine children, three of whom died in infancy. Franks served as president, or parnas, of Shearith Israel and along with the Levys mingled socially among the city’s Protestant elite: the Livingstons, Bayards, De Lanceys, and Van Cortlandts.

  Worldly and educated, Abigail wrote letters to her children quoting the novels of Henry Fielding and the works of Dryden, Montesquieu, and Pope. She proudly observed the Sabbath, kept kosher, and worshipped at the synagogue on the High Holidays. Wedded to tradition, she was not above impatience with it, writing her son with complaints about “the many superstitions we are clog’d with.”18

  But the Franks family’s stately existence blew up in 1743, when their daughter Phila ran off with Oliver De Lancey, the unruly scion of a wealthy family, one of many who lent their names to streets in Lower Manhattan. Years earlier, Oliver and some friends had been accused of breaking into and ransacking the home of a Dutch Jewish emigrant, swearing, and threatening to rape the wife. Charges were not brought in that episode. Jacob reconciled himself to Phila’s marriage, perhaps seeing some advantage to it, but Abigail refused to speak to her or let Oliver in her home. There is no evidence that mother and daughter ever reconciled. In still another instance of difficulties in mingling with the majority population, Judah Monis, the first Jew in America to receive a college degree—from Harvard, where he was an instructor in Hebrew—nonetheless converted two years after graduating, in 1722, motivated perhaps by his need for a job, and his falling in love with a Gentile, Abigail Marret.19

  REVOLUTION AND ANOTHER ESCAPE

  The American Revolution confronted the few hundred Jews living in New York City, especially the so-called patriots, with something tragically familiar—a forced exodus. A few weeks after July 4, 1776, the British under General William Howe moved swiftly to snuff out the insurrection in the American colonies and take the city from the rebels.

  General George Washington, anticipating an attack, had amassed his troops defensively in lower Manhattan. But British ships had surreptitiously ferried Howe’s army from New England to Staten Island for their assault. After crossing New York Harbor, General Howe seized control of Brooklyn Heights and then hopscotched across the bay to Lower Manhattan. Washington fled across the Hudson River to New Jersey and then Pennsylvania. The British managed to remain in the city through most of the Revolutionary War.

  Like other citizens of the busiest port in North America, Jews faced a dilemma as this drama unfolded. In light of their precarious history, they vacillated between the patriots and their new British military overlords, in some cases pledging allegiance to both sides for as long as it was practical. Most in the city and the colonies generally appear to have lined up with the rebels, however. Many joined the Continental Army and fell in battle. Others contributed funds. For example, in Philadelphia, Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew, raised such large sums that James Madison praised him as “our little friend in Front Street” who, to his astonishment, asked for no recompense.20

  Not surprisingly, war posed new tests to the ability of Jews to maintain their identity, laws, and traditions. A 1777 diary entry from a Hessian officer fighting for the British, Conrad Doehla, attests to the problem: “The Jews [in America] cannot . . . be told, like those in our country, by their beards and costume, but they are dressed like all other citizens, shave regularly, and also eat pork . . . moreover do not hesitate to intermarry. The Jewish women have their hair dressed and wear French finery like the women of other faiths. They are very much enamored of and attached to Germans.”21

  After Washington fled New York, so did many Jewish patriots. Among them was a young New York–born cleric with piercing eyes and thick dark hair named Gershom Mendes Seixas, who had been elected spiritual leader of Shearith Israel in 1768 at the remarkably young age of twenty-two. Seixas, the son of a Sephardic father and an Ashkenazic (German-speaking European) mother, was a scion of the congregation, which had moved to a modest two-story building on Mill Street, just south of Wall Street.

  Seixas (pronounced Say-shas) was described by associates as a man of considerable intellect and charm. Though he lacked formal religious training, he had been determined to go into the ministry rather than business trades. In his escape from New York, he took the synagogue’s Torah scrolls—partly burned when Hessian soldiers set fire to the sanctuary—along with other paraphernalia, going first to Connecticut, where British forces continued to harass settlements along the coast, and then to Philadelphia. (Jewish refugees in Norwalk, Connecticut, likened the city’s destruction by the British to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the same season, commemorated in the fast of Tisha B’av.) In Philadelphia, Seixas served as hazan, or cantor, at Mikveh Israel.

  Toward the end of the war, Shearith Israel’s president, or parnas, Hayman Levy, beseeched Seixas to return to his home synagogue. But Seixas was not so eager. He wrote Levy that he had heard many reports about “divisions among the reputable members of the congregation, by which means a general disunion seems to prevail instead of being united to serve the Deity, consonant to our holy law.” In 1757, for example, leaders of the congregation had tried to oust members who did business on the Sabbath, ate nonkosher food, and committed “other Heinious [sic] Crimes.” But six months after being expelled, the miscreants were welcomed back, along with their donations and dues.22

  Despite the turbulent atmosphere, Seixas gently told Levy that if perhaps his starting salary of £80 a year (plus a small bachelor’s quarters and free firewood) could somehow be raised, he might consider returning to his old congregation. “Do that what you know to be right, that the Lord may be with thee in all thy ways,” Seixas wrote the parnas.

  Levy was a tough-minded businessman and storekeeper originally from the Lake Champlain region, where he sold goods to Indians in return for furs. He had once even been fined by his own congregation for using “indecent and abusive language,” perhaps another example of what Seixas had been concerned about. Yet Levy gave in to Seixas’s demands and offered a salary of £200, asking him to return at once, before Passover. That did not end the controversy. Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, home synagogue of the famed Haym Salomon, financier of the war, protested Seixas’s decision to leave so quickly. Seixas appealed to Levy for a delay, noting that the roads were difficult to travel in the winter in any case. Levy was adamant, and by April 1784, Seixas was back at Mill Street, where he served until hi
s death in 1816. Reflecting the spirit of its role in a new nation, Shearith Israel welcomed Governor George Clinton to its synagogue in 1783 by likening the victory for independence to the Jews’ return from exile. A Hebrew prayer at the congregation compared the birth of the thirteen states to the deliverance of the Jews from bondage that would hasten the Jews’ own redeemer.23

  But the saga of Minister Seixas has another revealing component about the important but still precarious role that Jews played at the time of the American revolution and its immediate aftermath. In this period, Jews in America remained small in number—no more than 2,000 to 3,000. 24 They constructed synagogues as the character of their life adjusted to the comforting idea that they could thrive in a brand-new country that was uniquely welcoming to them. Americanization represented an unprecedented chapter of belonging, a complete break from the traditions of their forefathers in the long and tortured history of Jewish experience.

  TO BIGOTRY NO SANCTION . . .

  The inauguration of General Washington as the first president in 1789 served as an emotional capstone for Jews living in the newly established United States. Seixas, as a widely renowned figure in the colonies, represented the Jewish community at the festivities, along with fifteen Christian ministers. He also became the first Jew to serve as a trustee of Columbia College, founded by royal charter in 1754 as Kings College and then still a Christian institution. Seixas was a traditionalist on most matters, but he later became the first “rabbi” (however unofficial the term for him) to use English (rather than Portuguese) for some prayers. As an acquaintance of Christian leaders in the community, he sometimes gave sermons to Christian congregations, including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and invited Christian ministers to his congregation. He went so far as to describe himself as “minister” to the Jews of New York City, a symbol of his acceptance outside his community. In the process, he became what one historian calls “the first Jewish example of a type of religious leadership characteristic of Protestantism in the American setting but new to the Jewish tradition”—a full-fledged member of the new country’s pluralistic religious establishment.25

  But how established were the Jews, actually?

  Some old restrictions on Jews remained even after a revolution waged partly in the name of freedom of religion. Seixas, when he was still back in Philadelphia, shortly after American independence, joined with Haym Salomon and other members of their congregation to petition the Pennsylvania authorities against a new requirement that members of the state legislature take an oath containing the phrase “I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament.” They were unsuccessful in their appeal, although a parade in Philadelphia in 1788 attests to the equal status of Jews in that community. To celebrate the new Constitution, Jews marched in the city and conspicuously ate kosher at their own table afterward. 26

  Similar strictures applied to Jews for many decades after the revolution. The right to hold public office remained limited for decades in Maryland, New Hampshire, and elsewhere. A group of Jews petitioned the Maryland Assembly to adjust the language restricting officeholding to Christians in the 1790s, but it took another couple decades for the small community of Jews in Baltimore to get the state to extend liberties to Jews in 1825.

  A close reading of the Jewish community’s relationship with George Washington also suggests a certain tentativeness to their acceptance. One of Seixas’s brothers, Moses Mendes Seixas—among the organizers of the Bank of Rhode Island and the president of the historic Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island—presented Washington with a letter on the occasion of his visit in 1790. “Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits, and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to Newport,” it declared to the new president. (The congregation, founded in the 1600s, employed a Palladian-style design for the new synagogue, the first in New England, dedicated in 1763. It served as a hospital for the British military during the Revolutionary War and was returned to the Jews after the British evacuated. In the nineteenth century, it became known as the Touro Synagogue, named after one of its early families in honor of their generosity for its upkeep. It remains the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States.)

  Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport in response is justly famous. It suggested that for the Jews, America might prove itself to be the Promised Land for which they yearned, a harbinger perhaps of the debate to come among American Jews over whether their loyalty to the United States should be compromised by prayers for deliverance back to the Holy Land on Judgment Day. But a double-edged meaning could have been inferred as well from one of Washington’s equally famous phrases: “For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

  Was there, one might ask, a whiff of conditionality in Washington’s suggestion that the Jews should “demean” themselves as a requirement for citizenship? The challenge of comporting themselves, and perhaps conforming themselves, was to be a major recurring theme of the American Jewish experience.

  SEPHARDIM VS. ASHKENAZIM: EARLY SKIRMISHES

  The earliest difficulties within the Jewish community derived from customs followed by two traditions, Sephardic and Ashkenazi. Begun as a predominantly Sephardic community, New York had from its earliest days a portion of non-Sephardic Jews. A famous example was Asser Levy, who had immigrated to Amsterdam from Vilnius, or Vilna, then part of Poland, before coming to New Amsterdam, by some accounts as a part of the group of asylum seekers aboard the Ste. Catherine. In New York, he successfully demanded the right of Jews to stand guard with Dutch burghers to protect the city. It was not until 1720, however, that Ashkenazi Jews formed a majority of the city’s population, and Shearith Israel, established by Sephardim, became an initial battleground over their varying customs and traditions. Ashkenazi arrivals often viewed their Sephardic brethren as elitist, complacent, and more lax in their observances, but many Sephardim argued that the opposite was the case, looking down on Ashkenazi Jews as abrasive and uncouth. Indeed, some Sephardic communities turned inward in America and increased their attachment to orthodox traditions.

  The division of Jews into different camps was an old story, going back at least to the time when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE and Jews were divided into inhabitants of Babylon and Palestine. More diffusions occurred after the fall of the rebuilt “Second Temple” to the Romans in 70 CE. These scatterings of Jews in the Mediterranean world were sometimes followed by persecution and forced exile. But many if not most Jews no doubt also voluntarily traveled and settled in new homelands to seek opportunities as merchants and adventurers.

  Establishing themselves in Spain, they spoke the medieval dialect of Spanish known as Ladino, and this became the language of their subsequent exile in the rest of Europe from the Spanish Inquisition. Meanwhile, probably around the eighth century, Jews began migrating from Italy to the Rhineland, where they became known in Hebrew as Ashkenazim, eventually adopting a combination of German dialects that later evolved into Yiddish, with a healthy dose of loan words from Hebrew and various Slavic languages. (The term Sephardim comes from a certain place name, otherwise unknown, in the Biblical Book of Obadiah, one that sounds a bit like Spania, “Spain.” The term Ashkenazi derives similarly from another place name associated with a European kingdom cited in the book of Jeremiah.)

  A visitor to America in 1790 complained that synagogues “have no regular system” and their services were “in a state of fluctuation.”27 Synagogues were generally organized by a president or warden (parnas), a standing committee, and a hierarchy of members, usually with the biggest donors attaining higher status. Synagogue governance was thus a radical departure from what many Jews had experienced in large parts of
Europe. No government or rabbinical authority existed in the New World to set the rules for Jews. It was the lay leadership, for example, that could wield the power of herem, or excommunication (though such actions were more frequently threatened than executed), and establish all sorts of rules governing conduct.

  Adopting the spirit of the age, synagogues started writing constitutions. In 1790, Shearith Israel adopted a “bill of rights” enshrining sovereignty and opening membership and authority to more than just traditional elites.28 Synagogues became places mirroring the civics of the US government, deriving their rules from the “consent of the governed.” It was in that context that divisions over ethnic practices, liturgy, and other matters were adjudicated, particularly between various forms of Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions.

  The first Ashkenazi synagogue in America, Rodef Shalom of Philadelphia, was established in 1795 when Germans wanting to pray according to the German and Dutch rules broke away from the Sephardic rituals of Mikveh Israel, founded a half century earlier. The first such synagogue in New York also had a contentious beginning. Shearith Israel, proud of its status as the one and only synagogue in the city, asked the Common Council of New York to be granted exclusive right to slaughter and sell kosher meat in 1813. A faction in the synagogue objected, arguing that the law was “an encroachment on our religious rites,” and the council reversed itself.29 Later an ugly dispute arose over Seixas’s widow’s pension. These episodes demonstrated that all was not peaceful within the congregation.