The Chosen Wars Read online

  In 1776 a grand jury in Charleston called for Jews to be “restrained from allowing their negroes to sell goods in shops,” presumably because, while Jews could not themselves operate their stores on the Jewish Sabbath, they could delegate non-Jewish employees to do so. In 1801, the city council made it a crime for anyone to “exercise any worldly labor, business or work” on Sunday. The difficulties continued well into the nineteenth century, directed in particular at instances of Jews improperly selling goods to African Americans, which they may have done to create a legal fiction—selling their wares to blacks, who would then resell them, and then settling accounts after the Sabbath. Many arrests of Jews took place for such infractions in the state. Attempts to overturn these laws as unconstitutional were rejected on the ground that closures were within the ambit of police regulations and that, in any case, Christianity was part of “common law.” (The South Carolina legislature did not relax the Sunday laws until 1983.)11

  The Revolutionary War posed a dilemma for Jews in Charleston, dependent as they were on commercial ties with both sides. The first Jew believed to have died in the war of independence was Francis Salvador of South Carolina, scion of an aristocratic merchant Sephardic family tracing its roots to Amsterdam and England. Their property wealth extended to 200,000 acres in Greenwood County in the Piedmont Plateau, where some evidence suggests the Salvador family may have been planning to establish a haven for Jews. Salvador—who the records show had dealings with such Carolina patriots as William Henry Drayton, Charles Cotesworth (C. C.) Pinckney, and Edward Rutledge—was at his upcountry plantation when Cherokee Indians attacked, apparently encouraged by British sympathizers as the colonies headed toward revolt.

  Under siege, Salvador rode his horse twenty-eight miles through hostile territory to alert local patriot militias, thus becoming known in local lore as a Jewish Paul Revere figure in South Carolina. Salvador and Major Andrew Williamson made a surprise early-morning counterattack on the Indians but were ambushed, and Salvador was shot and scalped. In his final minutes of life, he asked Williamson if they had won the day. “I told him yes,” Williamson later recalled. “He said he was glad of it and shook me by the hand, and bade me farewell and said he would die in a few minutes.” Salvador was twenty-nine years old and very likely perished before hearing of the Declaration of Independence.12

  A “HOLY CONGREGATION” CHAFES UNDER TRADITION

  Charleston’s most prominent Jewish congregation, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, was the fifth Jewish congregation in the colonies, following others that had been formed in New York, Newport, Savannah, and Philadelphia.13 Its first chief rabbi was Moses Cohen, though no proof exists that he was ordained. Worshippers met initially at a wooden house on Union (now State) Street near Queen Street, and kept to strict Orthodox traditions. Anyone violating the Sabbath or other holidays was subject to “severe penalties and forfeiture of the honors of the Synagogue,” according to the congregation’s earliest historian, Nathaniel Levin. They used the Minhag Sepharad (Sephardic Custom), adopted by Portuguese congregations in London and Amsterdam, and power was vested in an adjunta, or board, of eighteen members. Isaac DaCosta was elected hazan. Joseph Tobias was parnas, and Philip Hart was mohel, performing circumcisions.14

  Beth Elohim “numbered among its members the most intellectual men among the Jews of America; many, too, whose fathers had lived here before them, and who by their industry and by their integrity had made the name Jew respected,” wrote an early historian of the community, Barnett A. Elzas. “The Jew was a man here.” But Elzas also described the original bylaws as “severely autocratic,” exercising great control over the conduct of Jews within the synagogue and outside it, in a manner that perhaps paved the way for difficulties.15

  Indeed, this early period was not without internal divisions, but details are sketchy. In 1775, a group of five congregants (including Isaac DaCosta) claimed that two other congregants, Emanuel Abrahams and Myer Moses, had acted “contrary to the original institution & rules” of the synagogue. No specifics exist. But the five dissidents appear to have defected to another place of worship with plans to build another synagogue. Their defection occurred just as a group of new arrivals, some from Germany, came to Charleston, splitting it into the same two ethnic factions that were driving Sephardim and Ashkenazim apart in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

  With British forces occupying Charleston, at least some Jewish patriots fled. Isaac DaCosta, like Seixas in New York, escaped to Philadelphia, where he also joined the Sephardic congregation, Mikveh Israel, in 1782. But his return after the war reignited the synagogue’s ethnic divide, just as in Shearith Israel. It was kindled by DaCosta’s family wanting him to be buried in a separate Sephardic cemetery.16

  After sending its own congratulatory letter to Washington in 1790, Beth Elohim petitioned South Carolina the next year to incorporate officially, pledging that its members would “be conducive to the decent and regular exercise of their religion and public worship of the Almighty God, ruler of the universe, to the proper maintenance of the poor, and to the support and education of the orphans of their society. . . .” The South Carolina legislature authorized its incorporation the same year.17

  By 1820, Charleston continued to be the home of the largest Jewish community in the United States, with a population that had grown to 700, compared to only 550 in New York City, 450 in Philadelphia, 200 in Richmond, 150 in Baltimore, 100 in Savannah, and 500 to 600 others in the rest of the country. (In all, Jews constituted less than a tenth of a percent of the total US population of 4 million.)18

  Internal disagreements at Beth Elohim spilled into a struggle to find a suitable hazan after the death of the incumbent in 1805. One candidate was brought in from London and sent back immediately. The arrival of the Reverend Abraham Azuby as the hazan and rabbi of Beth Elohim in the 1790s repaired the breach between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi branches, but Azuby died in 1805, whereupon the congregation appealed to Bevis Marks Synagogue, the oldest in London, for help in filling the vacancy. But the rabbi they sent from London, Benjamin Cohen D’Azevedo, arrived with his family only to be rejected as “sickly” and for other reasons not qualified.

  The synagogue then turned to its own members to fill the job. In 1811 they recruited Emanuel Nunes Carvalho, a London-born rabbi who had served in Barbados and then New York. But he too ran into controversy and trouble with the board, according to the writings of Mordecai Manuel Noah, who lived for a time in the city. According to Noah’s writings, Carvalho’s offense was teaching the children of the synagogue to sing a concluding psalm in the morning service in a “handsome manner” that did away with the “discordance” everyone was accustomed to. Noah had a gift for exaggeration, but he reported that a dispute over the singing led to a “rabble” of “vagrant Jews” fighting one another at the synagogue.19

  Increasingly, however, the Jews of Charleston were chafing under the liturgy and order of service they found alien and restrictive. Congregation members were growing uneasy about the practice of allowing members to bid on various honors, such as taking the Torah from the ark or reading from it. The Sabbath service was too long for many. It took three hours or more and was entirely in Hebrew, of a kind chanted or mumbled hurriedly and indistinctly by congregants, robbing the prayers of any religious significance, in view of the critics. “Almost no one understood the language,” one early dissenter, Abraham Moïse, later wrote. “Substance has yielded to form, the religion of the heart to the observance of unmeaning forms and ceremonies, while we are forced to witness the impious exchange of the honours of the synagogue for a consideration in pounds, shillings, and pence.” In a biography of his grandfather, the writer L. C. Moïse described that service as imbued by “cabalistic and Talmudic writings, and the erroneous doctrines of the imperious rabbis.” 20

  But decisions on making changes in the service belonged to a select category of leaders called yahidim—people who had resided in the city for two years. Only they could vote for m
embers of a twenty-five-member “General Adjunta” and also a smaller “Private Adjunta,” which in turn elected the parnas, and the rules also banned anyone from forming a second synagogue congregation in Charleston.

  On December 23, 1824, increasingly frustrated by what they felt were obsolete and obscure practices at Beth Elohim, forty-seven members of the congregation signed a petition, or “memorial,” to call for changes in the service. The “memorial” instructed Aaron Phillips, their chairman, to deliver it to the synagogue board. “The memorial of the undersigned, showeth unto your honourable body, that they have witnessed with deep regret, the apathy and neglect which have been manifested towards our holy religion,” it began. “As inheritors of the true faith, and always proud to be considered by the world as a portion of ‘God’s chosen people,’ they have been pained to perceive the gradual decay of that system of worship, which, for ages past, peculiarly distinguished us from among the nations of the earth.” Elaborating, they noted that they had become “seriously impressed” with the belief that “certain defects” in the system of worship were the source of the problem. These defects, they argued, would “darken the mind” of future generations, preventing them from a “more rational means of worshipping the true God.” The manifesto called first for at least some prayers to be repeated in English by the reader in order to achieve “more decency and decorum.” Not everyone, it noted, had the time to learn Hebrew and thus understand the service. Next, the manifesto called for “the absolute necessity of abridging the service generally.” The length, it was argued, meant that the prayer readers, rushing to finish before noon, raced so fast through the Hebrew that the words were nearly incomprehensible. Expressing disdain for the bidding wars over honors, such as the honor of reciting the blessings before and after each section of the weekly Torah portion, the petitioners argued that such auctions gave an unfortunate impression to children and strangers, perhaps reinforcing the unwanted stereotype of Jewish crassness. And they called for sermons or lessons to be delivered as ministers in churches had done. Finally, they warned, that actions must be taken to protect Jews in the face of Christian missionary activity, and they cited examples of reforms under way in Holland, Germany, and Prussia.

  “We wish not to overthrow, but to rebuild,” the manifesto concluded. “We wish not to destroy, but to reform and revise the evils complained of; we wish not to abandon the Institutions of Moses, but to understand and observe them; in fine, we wish to worship God, not as slaves of bigotry and priestcraft, but as the enlightened descendants of that chosen race whose blessings have been scattered throughout our land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”21

  Who were these petitioners?

  First, they tended to be younger and less wealthy members of the congregation. Many had gotten to know each other through outside social and charity groups, such as the Hebrew Orphan Society and the Freemasons, or through private academies for the young, such as one established by a local writer and educator, Isaac Harby. As a group, the petitioners “were young, civically involved, and philanthropically oriented individuals,” writes the scholar Gary P. Zola. In effect they represented what Zola calls “the first formalized effort to reform Judaism in North America.”22

  As radical as the dissenters were, they gave no suggestion that they wanted to withdraw from Beth Elohim. Rather they wanted to reform it from within. But their wishes for change in the system were not to be fulfilled.

  THE SCHISM DEEPENS

  It did not take long for the reformers’ plea to be spurned. On January 20, 1825, the adjunta noted that such fundamental changes in the synagogue required a revision of its 1820 constitution, which could only be adopted by the executive officers or by two thirds of the congregation’s members. In other words, the petitioners were told they needed signatures of two thirds of the synagogue congregation even to have a debate.23

  In response, the dissenters decided to create the “Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit,” adopting their own constitution on February 15, 1825. The reforms constituted an agenda far more radical than anything seen so far in the United States. In 1826, the Society made a clean break from Beth Elohim and began soliciting funds. They maintained that far from seeking radical changes, they wanted to make it more possible to adhere to fundamental principles of Judaism. But the leadership of Beth Elohim disagreed, and for the time being, their ruling was law.

  Initially, the Reformed Society met in a Masonic hall in 1824. Two years later it was incorporated by an act of the state legislature and appealed for subscriptions in a circular calling for more English to be used in prayers. The society’s credo substituted the immortality of the soul, an emerging idea among some Jewish scholars, for the traditional Jewish belief in a resurrection of the dead. They further declared that only the Ten Commandments, not the entire Torah, were revealed by God to the Jewish people—and that the 613 commandments that by ancient reckoning governed daily practices of Jews were also not revealed orally by God to Moses, as traditional Judaism asserted. The society also introduced a newly explicit concept of “good faith towards all mankind” as a Jewish tenet and discarded the belief in a personal messiah, replacing it with the idea that God was the “only true Redeemer” for humanity. This latter declaration was an implicit message of rejection of Christianity as well. In keeping with a custom that started in Europe, the synagogue that the Reformers had in mind would also be called a “temple,” intended partly to suggest that worship would be conducted in a place supplanting the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, which Jews supposedly no longer needed to mourn and for which restoration was no longer seen as necessary.24

  These bold steps were taken in the shadow of the doctrine as enunciated in the twelfth century by Maimonides, whose thirteen articles that Jews were to embrace “with perfect faith” had served as a lasting legacy for many Jews for many hundreds of years. Scholars note that Maimonides’s tenets were intended less as dogma than as a pedagogical tool. But they were taken as important by Jews because of their help in understanding how to relate to God. Maimonides was a pathfinder for Jews in many other respects by helping to define the identity of God for a modern world. Scholars note, for example, that in the early parts of the Bible, God could be encountered on Earth as an angel, or present inside a burning bush, or as an actual, human-shaped God with a body that could be observed by Moses and others on Mount Sinai. Toward the end of biblical times, God was unseen, residing in highest heaven, surrounded by angels but accessible to ordinary humans only through prayer.25 Maimonides took the existence of God further into the realm of an incorporeal, unknowable, and eternal entity, though Maimonides also continued to maintain that the laws of Moses—transmitted from God in “written” and “oral” form—were true and divine, as were the interpretations applied by the rabbinic sages. His contention that God’s identity was essentially incomprehensible to ordinary mortals has stood the test of time for Jews throughout the world.

  Besides omitting the concept of a personal messiah, the Reformed Society proposed a number of more down-to-earth changes. Believing that covering men’s heads during services was never intended to be a legal requirement, some members prayed bareheaded. A confirmation service was proposed, calling for young adults to come forward and confirm their devotion to Judaism, mirroring a practice in churches. The reformers also laid plans for their own prayer book, or siddur, in which original prayers in English accompanied translations into English of Hebrew prayers, along with the Hebrew originals. Overseen by David N. Carvalho, Isaac Harby, and Abraham Moïse and published in 1830, it became the first published reform prayer book in North America. Many experts view The Sabbath Service and Miscellaneous Prayers, Adopted by the Reformed Society of Israelites, as one of the most radical liturgical innovations in Judaism introduced up until that time.

  The articles of faith embraced by the Reformed Society were certainly part of Jewish tradition. They acknowledged God to be the creator of the
universe, that there was only one God and that God’s identity was all-knowing but not “corporeal” or comprehensible, as Maimonides had suggested. They held that God rewards those who observe his commandments as delivered to Moses, but that an all-encompassing humanism, directed at all peoples and not just the Jews, “is among the most acceptable offerings to the Deity” and that “the pure and upright heart is the chosen temple of Jehovah,” an alternative pronunciation of the name of God in the Bible. (The name “Jehovah” was thought at the time to be the original pronunciation of the sacred name of God in the Bible, YHWH, which had ceased to be pronounced out loud by Jews in early post-biblical times.) But references to the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead, and return of Jews to Zion, along with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, were conspicuous by their absence, borderline heretical, and precedent setting.26

  Gary P. Zola summarizes the dominant themes of the society as anti-rabbinical, based on the belief that Judaism had long been manipulated by the laws of the ancient Jewish sages. The Charleston reformers accused the Talmudic rabbis of “priestcraft,” a disparaging term used in early modern Europe to condemn the obscurantism and corruption of the Christian priesthood. In addition to their disdain for the negative influence of Talmudic sages, the members of the Society professed a patriotism toward America rooted in Jewish tenets. Of equal importance, Zola notes, was its effective codification of the idea that because God does not intervene in daily affairs, it is up to humans to execute his moral code through good deeds. The issue of whether or not God rewards and punishes humans for their individual or collective behavior has been debated by scholars citing texts for and against through the millennia. But the South Carolina Jews gave strong new impetus to the idea that people are responsible for their own actions. As Harby put it, the beauty and splendors of Nature reflected the existence of God, even if the notion of God’s intervention to punish those who sinned was “preposterous and unjust.”27