The Chosen Wars Read online

  Another problem was the chaos of the services themselves—a cacophony of noisy individual prayers and worshippers interrupting the reading of the hazan. The congregation leaders sought to impose some order by introducing what became known as “decorum” in the service. Rules were introduced in 1805 “to promote solemnity and order” that might be presentable to outsiders and inspire congregants.30

  Despite these changes, several younger Ashkenazi members at Shearith Israel were not satisfied. They asked for more. First, they sought permission to conduct their own Sabbath services under Ashkenazi tradition, though only in the summer. It is not precisely clear which traditions they wanted to change—the two branches of Judaism contained many sub-branches following different rules of when Jewish boys should begin to wear prayer shawls, what foods can be eaten on Passover, and which blessings are called for at what time. Whatever the specifics, the Askhenazi congregations were summarily rebuffed. Later they broke away to form a new organization called Hebra Hinuch Nearim (Society for Youth Education) paving the way for establishment of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun (Children of Israel, Jeshurun being a poetic name for Israel) in 1825. The new congregation first rented a place at Pearl Street, closer to where many of them had moved, and then bought and remodeled their own building, converting what had been the First Coloured Presbyterian Church in 1827.

  The thirty-two founding members of B’nai Jeshurun devoted themselves to strict keeping of their faith in accordance with German and Polish traditions. They also adapted services used by the Great Synagogue of London, the earliest Ashkenazi congregation established in the British Isles after Jews were permitted to return to England in the seventeenth century, having been expelled in 1290. B’nai Jeshurun leaders also called for less formal worship, accompanied by explanations for young people not versed in Jewish law, and for no permanent leader to dictate norms to others.

  In declaring their independence, these Ashkenazi Jews importantly introduced a new willingness to challenge authority in a spirit of anti-elitism and a demand for democratic self-government. Later B’nai Jeshurun broke another barrier: it became the first congregation in New York to conduct services in English.31 B’nai Jeshurun also focused in its first decades on instituting decorum (omitting obscure prayers and reading prayers like the Kaddish in unison rather than in what was sometimes a cacophonous babble), and reforming the practice of worshippers paying to receive synagogue honors, such as reading from the Torah. In addition, they dropped the requirement for special gowns to be worn by the cantor and rabbi, all of these changes invigorating the service with a new emphasis on performance.

  Soon and inevitably, there was a revolt against B’nai Jeshurun for becoming too “Americanized” and perhaps too affluent. Thus, a separate group of newcomer German, Polish, and Dutch immigrants established Congregation Ansche Chesed, a third congregation in New York, in 1829. It was so impoverished that it had to ask for ornaments and building materials from the more affluent Shearith Israel, and it struggled to maintain rituals of meat slaughtering, baking matzo, and building a ritual bath, or mikveh. It also experienced personnel struggles. The minutes show that members complained that the hazan was frequently seen gambling and hanging out at billiard parlors and perhaps even houses of prostitution, making him “unfit.” By the 1840s the congregation was on a steadier footing and started to enforce rules of decorum designed to avoid “the present confusion” in the service and have only those authorized to read prayers out loud.32

  These disputes paved the way for a pattern that became typical in American synagogues. As Jacob Rader Marcus, an eminent historian of early American Jewry, has written: “Squabbles in God’s house were almost as traditional as the liturgy itself; one sometimes suspects that these quarrels testified to a rugged spiritual health.”33

  ARARAT AND THE DREAM OF INDEPENDENCE

  As comfortable as Jews were living as equals in America, there remained a yearning among some for something more—the self-governing status of a different era in Europe, and perhaps the ancient epoch of Jewish kingdoms in antiquity. An important figure in that historical longing was also an early precursor to the modern movement of Zionism. But Mordecai Manuel Noah was as eccentric as he was compelling.

  Like Seixas, Noah was not a rabbi even though he welcomed the trappings of one. (There were no rabbis in the United States until the 1840s, but there were some in Jamaica, Surinam, Curaçao, and elsewhere in the Americas.) Noah was in fact a journalist, playwright, and sometime diplomat whose editorials on the War of 1812 led to an appointment by President James Madison as consul to the Kingdom of Tunis before he was removed on the ground that it was inappropriate for a Jew to serve in a Muslim realm. Noah’s protests over the ouster were ignored at the State Department, deepening his concerns about the precarious status of Jews in the United States.

  In New York City, Noah was active in Tammany Hall politics and rose to the position of high sheriff. In 1825, the same year as the rebellion of Ashkenazim at Shearith Israel, he took up an altogether different cause. With virtually no support from anyone—not even his fellow Jews—he sought to establish a Jewish “refuge” on Grand Island in the Niagara River, just south of Niagara Falls. Noah proposed to call his new community Ararat, after the mythical mountain where his biblical namesake’s ark came to rest.

  Encouraged in part by a group of German Jewish intellectuals with whom he corresponded, Noah sought permission to set up his community from the New York legislature. Some lawmakers were favorable, but in the absence of a bill, Noah persuaded a friend to purchase a section of Grand Island for his purpose. For the opening of his community, Noah presided at a dedication ceremony on the Niagara riverbank. He turned it into quite a scene. Cannons boomed, and military and Masonic groups marched. Wearing a red ermine-trimmed robe, with a medal around his neck, Noah proclaimed himself “Governor and Judge of Israel.” The band played the “Grand March” from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus (it had been composed in 1746). Noah read his “Proclamation to the Jews” urging young people the world over to come to his colony, where polygamy would be forbidden and prayers would be offered in Hebrew. Noah also declared that Jews throughout the world ought to defray the costs of establishing Ararat as a farming community and refuge.

  For all its crackpot absurdity, Ararat embodied a longstanding aspiration for Jews, the idea of complete self-government as a means to self-preservation. But Ararat never got off the ground. Indeed, Noah seems never to have set foot on the island himself. But Noah’s antics, with their historically resonant and prophetic elements, contained the seeds of what he predicted would come true—establishment eventually of a homeland in Palestine. In asserting that such a place would come to be, Noah channeled traditional Jewish prayers that were to be increasingly challenged by Jews living and growing perfectly comfortable in the United States.

  In fact, Noah had for years been speaking of the Zionist ideals in concrete terms. As early as 1818, at Shearith Israel, he flatly predicted that the Jews would one day return to Palestine “in triumphant numbers” to “take their rank among the governments of the earth.” Years later, in 1837, he wrote a Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel but declared once again his belief that with the help of England and France, the Jews would eventually reestablish their homeland in the place of their ancient kingdoms.

  “I confidently believe in the restoration of the Jews,” Noah declared again in 1844, in New York, adding an appeal to American Christians to help, citing passages in the Bible. These proclamations were seen among some Jews as dangerous, not only because they exposed Jews to accusations of divided loyalties, but also because they fed Christian and anti-Semitic impulses to convert or get rid of Jews in America. Among the worriers was Isaac Leeser, a hazan in Philadelphia who was the most prominent traditional Jewish religious scholar of the era. He declared that the Jews “had better remain as they are now, scattered over all the earth, rather than expose thems
elves to an extermination by some modern Haman,” a reference to the evil persecutor of Jews in the Book of Esther.34

  Restive as Jews and their leaders were over these sectarian issues, a different storm was brewing in what was then the largest Jewish community in America—Charleston, South Carolina. It started with a fire that nearly destroyed the entire downtown.

  Two

  LET HARMONY ASCEND

  The ocean air that buffeted the busy docks at Charleston Harbor in the years after the American Revolution was suffused with the briny fragrance of world commerce: dried fish from New England, coffee from Brazil, tobacco from Cuba, and pomegranates, bananas, and citrus fruit from the Caribbean. It was a time and place of hard work, sweat, prosperity, and self-assurance.

  Charleston, South Carolina, had been a major trading center in the British colonial era, and its success only grew in America’s first decades. Fort Sumter, constructed to defend the port in the War of 1812, stood proudly on an island in the bay to guard the city’s wealth and strategic importance. Charleston was also a major center in the slave trade. As an export center, the port was a crucial place for shipping cotton, indigo, and rice grown at nearby plantations, some of which were also owned by Jewish families that had immigrated to South Carolina in the previous century.1

  Accompanying the Jews’ good fortune in the early decades after the revolution was a religious revival spreading throughout the United States, known as the Second Great Awakening—and a cultural revival as well. New churches, theaters, societies, and clubs sprang up throughout the cobblestone streets of Charleston’s downtown, which was also filled with banks, offices, stores, hotels, warehouses, coffeehouses, and shops, many of which were Jewish owned. Along the waterfront at Broad Street and East Bay Street, elegant Georgian-style mansions of brick, iron filigree, and masonry with balconies, verandas, gardens, and gates stood as symbols to the city’s confidence and affluence.

  The population of 18,000 people in 1800 was also an extraordinarily cosmopolitan mixture of British colonial descendants, French Huguenots, North and Southern Germans, Creole émigrés from the Caribbean, African slaves—and a handful of increasingly influential Jews. Indeed by 1800, Charleston had the largest Jewish community in the United States—500 people, out of a total population of 1,000 Jews in South Carolina, which in turn constituted something like 40 percent of the entire Jewish population of 2,500 in the United States. By 1811, the estimate of Jews in Charleston, many of them Sephardim who had emigrated from the Netherlands or the Caribbean, climbed to a range of 600 to 700, some of whom owned slaves or engaged in the slave trade.2

  But in 1838, an unprecedented disaster struck Charleston’s complacency and prosperity. After an unusually dry spring left the city’s cisterns dangerously low, a fire broke out on the evening of April 27 in a shed in the city’s commercial center. By late evening it had roared throughout the downtown’s wooden buildings. Overwhelmed by the water shortage, firefighters resorted to demolishing buildings to create firebreaks, blowing them up with gunpowder in some cases. Before being contained, the conflagration swept through nearly 150 acres at the heart of the city’s commercial district, destroying more than a thousand buildings, most of them made of wood, including homes, stores, a recently constructed hotel, and stables. Among the ruins were the smoldering remains of three churches—and one synagogue, Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (Holy Congregation House of God) established as the city’s first Jewish congregation in 1749.3 Indeed of the 560 homes and businesses destroyed, Jews owned or rented 69.4

  Its synagogue in ruins, the Beth Elohim congregation met at the Hebrew Orphan Society building and began raising funds from around the country, the Caribbean, and elsewhere overseas for a new place of worship, although most funds came from fire insurance proceeds. Before long a cornerstone was laid on January 3, 1840, for the new marble building designed by a New York architect, Cyrus L. Warner. The builder was David Lopez, from a prominent family of Sephardic families. (In 1853, he also later built Institute Hall, the Italianate structure where South Carolina’s official secession was signed in 1860.)

  The new synagogue was designed to replicate a Greek temple, the fashion of the day for churches, banks, and other public buildings. It was of brownstone covered with stucco, 80 feet in length with a domed ceiling, six Doric columns in front, a marble floor, a mahogany ark, and a bronze chandelier. In another distinctive feature, its door did not face the street but was on the left side of the building, so that congregants could face east, toward Jerusalem, as they prayed toward the ark. As was traditional, the reading desk (bimah) was in the center, though many years later it was moved to the front of the ark, where it stands today.5

  On the wall of the synagogue were placed the Ten Commandments and—in an unusual innovation—only ten of the thirteen Articles of Faith enunciated by Maimonides, the preeminent Sephardic scholar who interpreted and codified Talmudic law in twelfth-century Spain. Omitted were the belief in the coming of a messiah who will someday restore Israel’s fortunes, the resurrection of the dead, and the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple, where animal sacrifices would be resumed as they had existed before the fall of the Temple in 70 CE.

  The new synagogue introduced an even more startling innovation—an organ—on the gallery at the western end of the sanctuary.

  On March 19, 1841, as an overflow crowd attended the opening of the new synagogue, and the hazan sounded the shofar four times, and the choir sang the Eighteenth Psalm (“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”). Worshippers carried the Torah scrolls to the ark and lit the eternal flame.

  Together they sang a hymn composed by Penina Moïse, daughter of a prominent Charleston family who had earlier helped found a Sunday school at the synagogue (the second one in America, after Philadelphia) and who had already become well known as a poet, educator, and early Jewish woman of letters in America. Clearly patterned after the popular Protestant church hymns of the day, the song culminated with a mixture of Jewish tradition and churchly music. The melody is lost, but it may well have been borrowed from a church hymnal and certainly sounds like one:

  Here, Oh Supreme! Our humble invocation;

  Our country, kindred, and the stranger bless!

  Bless too this sanctuary’s consecration,

  Its hallowed purpose of our hearts impress.

  Still, still, let choral harmony,

  Ascend before thy throne;

  While echoing seraphim reply

  The Lord our God is one! 6

  The plea for “choral harmony,” perhaps a reference to the angels surrounding the heavenly throne in Isaiah, was heartfelt, especially because it came after the struggles to rebuild the synagogue. But in fact, the history of the congregation at Beth Elohim had been filled with discord—over doctrine, over practices, and over whether the installation of an organ, and playing it on the Sabbath, violated Jewish law. The dispute in the tiny Jewish community of Charleston was an incubator of the forces that tore apart and ultimately transformed Judaism in America in the first century after the American Revolution.

  A COLONIAL ERA BEGINNING

  The first Jew of record in South Carolina, probably a converso, a Jew who had ostensibly converted to Christianity (though some continued to practice Judaism in secret following the Spanish Inquisition), was an interpreter for some Indians who were apparently Catholic, brought from Florida in 1695. The governor, implementing the colony’s ban on Catholics, sent them back. The episode illustrates the crucial role of Protestant religious identity throughout the colonies, but especially in the South. Two years later, for example, the colonial Assembly granted full freedom of worship—to Protestants only. Thus could Jews hold various public offices in Charleston into the era of independence, from police warden to postal officer and registrar. They also served on boards and commissions running schools, the local hospital, and orphanages.7

  In the early eighteenth century, many Jews who settled in Charleston came fr
om the Caribbean. They ranged from ordinary tradespeople to families of considerable wealth, and most arrived in the 1740s as the city took off as a commercial center. One prominent slaveholder, Mordecai Cohen, one of the wealthiest Jews in the city, had come from Poland and rose to financial success after starting out as an immigrant peddler. He purchased a 1,000-acre estate called Soldier’s Retreat, overlooking the Ashley River and operated by his son David, where slaves helped work in the fields and raise the Cohen children. (By 1830, an estimated 83 percent of Jews in Charleston were in families that owned slaves.)8

  Jews also voted in an election in 1703, which one historian speculates might have been the first such exercise of franchise in the West.9 Later in the century, they brought steamboats to the Savannah River, ran steamships to Havana, and helped establish the chamber of commerce. There were well-known Jewish writers, artists, teachers, lawyers, physicians, and publishers. Two of the four newspapers in Charleston were edited by Jews at one point. They were founding members of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Masonry in Charleston in 1801.10

  The influx of Jews stirred some resentment in the city. A letter in the Charleston Gazette of December 1, 1778, charged that immigrants of “the Tribe of Israel” arriving from Georgia came “with their ill got wealth.” But published letters by Jews assailed such slurs, showing confidence among them that they could speak out on their behalf. “Wealth and culture did not change the fact that some Jews felt uneasy in social situations,” writes the historian James William Hagy.

  Difficulties arose for Jews, however, out of their need to keep their shops open on Sunday, in violation of the state’s blue laws. The Sunday closings, affirmed by the South Carolina legislature in 1685 and again in 1712, were a hardship for Jews obliged by religious doctrine to keep their stores closed on Saturdays as well. (Indeed, their synagogue penalized them if they violated Jewish Sabbath restrictions.)