The Chosen Wars Page 7

  The God of these South Carolina Jews was best understood by reason and not blind faith in revelation from ancient times—again, a concept as old as Maimonides. But in revising the service and prayers for Jews, the reformers were not just adjusting doctrines. They were clearly emulating parts of church worship, such as the use of choirs, hymns, and an emphasis on restraint and dignity. No less important was their stress on religious tolerance and liberal universalism. These tenets embodied an attempt to universalize Judaism, as Zola puts it—to “Americanize” it—while taking pride in Judaism as a principal source of universal civilization and morality.28

  THE LEGACY OF ISAAC HARBY (1788–1828)

  The revolt of reformers can be usefully understood through Harby’s unorthodox but idealistic career as educator, journalist, playwright, literary critic, newspaper publisher, and editor. For Harby, as he put it, “the great cause of IMPROVEMENT in government, in religion, in morals, in literature, is the great cause of mankind.”29 Of major importance, however, was Harby’s concern—hardly without foundation—that an increasingly organized effort among Protestant evangelicals was under way to convert American Jews and that steps had to be taken to strengthen Judaism against such an assault.

  While defending Judaism, however, he conceded that he and other Jews actually knew little about their traditions, including Hebrew, and that the Spanish and Portuguese rituals at Beth Elohim were a barrier rather than a vehicle to achieving a new understanding of his own faith. Harby was also candid about his yearning for status and fame as a literary figure in the community at large. “Is there more praise in disgracing my forefathers than in becoming illustrious myself?” he once wrote.30

  Like many Sephardic Jews in America, Harby was originally descended from a family tracing its history to Spain and Portugal before the Inquisition. From there the family fled to Morocco and then to England, where Isaac’s grandfather worked as a jeweler and had six children, including Solomon, Isaac’s father. Solomon Harby arrived in Charleston in 1781 as the British faced defeat in the Revolutionary War and earned a reasonably secure living as a butcher and later an auctioneer. He was apparently not a particularly observant member of the Jewish community, having once been fined for not attending a general meeting of the synagogue. But he appears to have been involved in the Masonic lodge movement, where Jews and others developed values of public service and other civic virtues.

  Isaac was only seventeen when his father died and he became head of a family in straitened circumstances. But he continued to pursue a classic education, learning Latin, Greek, and French and other works of literature. He studied at an academy operated by the Reverend William Best, where he devoured Herodotus, Plutarch, Homer, Milton, and Sir Walter Scott, while also learning to draw. He also studied Protestant and Methodist religious treatises. Untrained in Talmudic studies, he nonetheless developed pride in his Jewish heritage and even claimed that the name Harby derived from the Hebrew word for sword, an inspiration for his creating a family crest featuring the image of a sword and shield. Enjoying the civic life of debate and public service, he wrote an ambitious twenty-page composition at a young age entitled an “Essay on Truth,” rejecting notions of supernatural revelation and divine intervention in the world. He decided early to pursue a career in law, teaching, and writing. He published essays and articles for newspapers under various pseudonyms and tried his hand at writing plays, with little success. After a local theater manager rebuffed him, evidently regarding Harby’s work as pretentious and academic, Harby started a literary magazine called the Quiver, possibly the first literary journal published by a Jew in the United States. Its purpose, Harby grandiloquently declared, was to offer the people of South Carolina “a species of DIVERSION, rather of a more refined, and we hope, of a more agreeable nature, than drinking punch or playing billiards.” It ran poetry, humorous anecdotes, letters seeking romantic advice, essays about local theater, and theater reviews before it folded after less than a year.

  These failures led Harby to move briefly to an island southwest of Charleston where he took up a kind of quest for spiritual meaning and a need to educate the world about Judaism, a subject that he knew little about except from Christian scholars. Moving back to Charleston in 1809, Harby took up playwriting again, again without success, so he turned to teaching, establishing an “academy” in 1810 modeled after English Latin grammar schools, where he oversaw the teaching of reading, writing, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, history, geography, Latin, and Greek. At last, he achieved success. The academy appealed to Charleston’s emerging Jewish elite families, providing Harby with what Zola, his biographer, describes as “emotional and financial stability.” He married Rachael Mordecai in 1810. A few years later, he grew restless again. This time he purchased a newspaper, a not unusual occupation for successful Jews in the South.

  The newspaper business was booming, in fact. His paper, called the Investigator, changed its name to the Southern Patriot and Commercial Advertiser in 1814, containing original pieces and reproducing articles from other papers in the United States and London. Working through local politicians, including up-and-coming Representative John C. Calhoun, he got a contract from the government to print the text of laws passed by the legislature in 1816.

  Still, Harby rarely dealt with Jewish topics, except to oppose attempts to convert Jews and to praise Napoleon for his efforts to emancipate French Jews. Eventually the paper failed, and Harby went back to teaching at his reopened academy, though by now he had become a person of prominence in Charleston and able to enroll nearly ninety students, most of them Jewish, some from the Hebrew Orphan Society. Tuition payments to the school kept Harby reasonably comfortable, at least for a time. While keeping up with his literary writings about Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Shakespeare, Harby then wrote his third (and last) play, Alberti, which debuted in 1819—a success at last. The play was set in Florence at the time of the Medicis, dealing with a complicated romance of two feuding brothers over a love interest against a backdrop of the struggle for political freedom. It was so popular that President James Monroe came to see it while in Charleston.

  The play brought him some financial success, but it was not enough to reverse the declining fortunes of his academy, forcing him to borrow money from the Hebrew Orphan Society, with which he became enmeshed in a legal dispute. To make ends meet, Harby turned back to journalism and became a contributing editor for the Charleston Gazette, where he advocated road improvements, warned of fire hazards, dispensed advice on nosebleeds, and emphasized the importance of female modesty.

  As the debates over free states versus slave states heated up in the 1820s, Harby defended the rights of slave states and, like many of his cohorts, feared the radicalism of those advocating abolition, especially by violence. A trial in 1822 over a revolt led by a former slave who had purchased his freedom stirred fears of spreading rebellion. Harby declared the insurrection “a scheme of wildness and of wickedness, enough to make us . . . shudder at the indiscriminate mischief of the plan and its objects.” After serving briefly as editor of the Gazette, Harby started a new afternoon paper called the Examiner. He backed the fiery antiestablishment war hero Andrew Jackson in the fateful 1824 election won by John Quincy Adams, and supported him again in 1828, when Jackson defeated Adams and went to the White House.

  Yet Harby’s financial troubles deepened. He had to close his academy and teach at another school for economically disadvantaged students. It was in this period of economic frustration and disappointment that he turned to a new cause—reforming Judaism. He spoke out on behalf of the Reformed Society of Israelites, defending the society’s stance on reform in speeches and a pamphlet, and served as its president in 1827. His purpose was clear: to alter and revise those parts of Judaism’s “prevailing system of worship, as are inconsistent with the present enlightened state of society, and [are] not in accordance with the Five Books of Moses and the Prophets.”31

  Three

  REBELLION IN CHARLESTON


  A troublesome specter haunted American Judaism in its early decades, despite the sense of belonging felt by most Jews. It was the specter of conversion. The first Jewish periodical in the United States, The Jew, published by Solomon Henry Jackson in New York City in the 1820s, was essentially an anti-missionary journal, for example. But it took some time for Harby and others to come to grips with the phenomenon. Initially, when the Reformed Society was getting started in 1824, Harby was sympathetic but not yet fully engaged in its commitment to adapt Judaism to contemporary demands. As the movement gathered steam, however, he was motivated to join the cause in large part to combat efforts by Protestant evangelical groups to persuade Jews to come to Jesus. The concerns had a basis in real events. In 1816, an organization called the “American Society for Evangelizing the Jews” was established in New York, followed by similar groups in Boston and other cities, all determined to make Jewish assimilation in America into a stepping-stone to a full embrace of Jesus Christ. The activities of these groups were reported in the Charleston press, and publicity was given to the activities of those Jews who had decided to convert.

  Harby appears to have grown obsessed with these developments. He dipped into various publications favoring conversion and other descriptions against them. He made clear that he was not opposed to Bible societies per se, only to these societies targeting Jews. In 1823, responding to a famous proselytizer’s plan to deliver lectures in Charleston, Harby assailed “those fond preachers who are vainly toiling to convert the Jews, by the very scripture which the Jews have taught them.”1 His sensitivity extended to deploring the Jewish stereotype of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

  Also of concern was publicity over what was known as the “Maryland Jew Bill,” a measure debated in the 1820s aimed at granting Jews in Maryland total political equality there. The bill was enacted in 1826, but many Jews were alarmed over the noisy resistance to it. It did not help that anti-Semitism came in the guise of romanticizing Jews as exotic and even virtuous and worthy of conversion. To refute such writings, Harby realized he had to counter the ignorance among Jews of their own religion, so he embarked on writings about Jewish matters and invited readers to come see the Torah at Beth Elohim.

  Harby’s comrades in arms were David N. Carvalho, who was to play a major role in revising the prayer book, and Abraham Moïse, the most fervent organizer and a close friend. At the society’s first-anniversary meeting on November 21, 1825, at a Masonic Hall, Harby delivered the keynote, notable for its articulation of the desire for change in Jewish self-identity. “Your principles are rapidly pervading the whole mass of Hebrews throughout the United States,” he declared. “What is it that we seek? The establishment of a new sect? No. Never. . . . What is it then that we ask of Hebrew Vestry? The abolition of the ancient language and form of Jewish worship? Far from it.”

  He opposed establishing a new synagogue and instead called on the leaders of Beth Elohim to “open the door to reason—to welcome, with the welcome of brethren, those who desire to add dignity to their religion.” The objective, he said, was to respect the feelings of the pious but to remove those parts of the service that “excite the disgust of the well-informed Israelite”—what he called rabbinical “interpolations” and repetitions. He proposed inclusion of English translations of prayers chanted in Hebrew, efforts to institute some solemnity in the service, and a “lecture or discourse upon the law” that would instruct worshippers and elevate their understanding.

  Three important justifications figured in Harby’s message: prayer, to come from the heart, must be uttered in languages that people could understand, namely English. Though Harby was a major advocate of students learning Greek and Latin, he argued it was absurd to use Hebrew exclusively for communicating with the divine. Second, Harby buttressed his proposal to set aside “rabbinical interpolations” by his reading of Jewish history, which came not simply from the Bible but from non-Jewish sources describing the suffering and dignity of Jews throughout history. He did not specify what he meant by these “interpolations,” but the general efforts to interpret Jewish law—what the biblical scholar James L. Kugel calls “the great Interpretive Revolution”—occurred in the centuries before and after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. These interpretations produced the rules that were to govern Judaism until modern times. For example, Deuteronomy’s most famous exhortation—the “Shema,” or “Hear, O Israel”—contains a series of commands for Jews to love God “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” It tells Jews to teach God’s commands to their children and bind them on their hands, between their eyes, and on their doorposts. It was the sages who converted this generalized and perhaps metaphorical commandment into a series of specific acts of piety and prayer. “It is no exaggeration to say that nearly every page of the Torah included at least one verse that had been radically recast by ancient interpreters,” writes Kugel.2

  Harby did not doubt that Jews since antiquity had preserved their identity and their religion by following this array of strictures on human conduct: eating kosher food, binding the commandments on their foreheads, and observing the Sabbath. But now that Jews were ready to contribute to civil society in Europe and America, he said, the “follies” and “vices” produced by rabbinical interpreters should be seen as the work, not of God, but of men, “retired within their closets, and shut up over their useless volumes” rather than their surroundings—men “who substituted shadow for substance, and form for reality,” as he put it. He attacked the rabbis whose interpretations bore the force of law down through the millennia as “fabulists and sophists, who, caught in the net of platonic subtlety, mingled Grecian metaphysics with Phariseean materialism; ceremonial and verbal refiners, who tortured the plainest precepts of the Law into monstrous and unexpected inferences.” And not least, Harby noted, these interpretations had drawn derision from non-Jews with whom Jews increasingly were interacting in America.3

  The “fabulists” of which Harby spoke were the interpreters of what is called the Oral Law, which the rabbis since ancient times have regarded as spoken directly from God to Moses. For Harby, however, “The only Law is the written one, found in the books of Moses.” Harby deplored the fact that even in America, Jews believed that “rabbinical doctrine or ceremony” had divine status and did not understand the necessity of adopting Judaism “to the circumstances of the times in which we enjoy our liberties.” He singled out exceptional men of letters he said had risen above the obscurantist interpolations of the rabbis, listing Maimonides, Spinoza, and Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century German scholar associated with Haskalah, the “Jewish enlightenment.” He also cited Isaac D’Israeli, a British contemporary and man of letters who later became best known as the father of Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian-era British prime minister.

  For the most part, he went on, rabbinic doctrine accepted by the majority of rabbis had become oppressive, foisted on the multitudes who then succumbed to the “bigotry of intellect and credulity of belief.” Harby did not blame the many centuries of Talmudic rabbis themselves. Indeed, he maintained that mistreatment of Jews throughout the ages had forced them to retreat into their own communities and ghettos, while adhering strictly to tradition as a survival mechanism. But now it was time to realize, he said, that the days of rejection and humiliation were over, and that Jews in America had been free from this subjugation. It was time, he said, for the Jews of America to adapt the institutions handed down to them “to the circumstances of the times in which we live.” They were not abandoning their tenets or practices, he went on. Rather they were abandoning the “rubbish” of the ages.4

  In conclusion, Harby delivered a distinctly religious and Jewish interpretation of the United States as “God’s new Israel.” He cited Malachi and Psalms to claim that the Bible had even referenced places outside the land of Israel that would shelter the people of Israel. And he argued that perhaps Jews had been dispersed for a reason—a mission—to spread the name of God a
mong the Gentiles. And he concluded with an exhortation from the Psalm 131:

  Behold how good and how pleasant it is

  For brethren to dwell together in unity!

  Harby’s address was so well-received he distributed it as a pamphlet a few weeks later, and it succeeded in bringing attention for his views to non-Jews, including Edward Livingston, former US representative of New York and later President Jackson’s secretary of state. Another notable commentator was former president Thomas Jefferson, then in his eighties, who said that while he was “little acquainted with the liturgy of the Jews or their mode of worship,” he found Harby’s approach “entirely reasonable.” (Jefferson, after his retirement from the White House, had become increasingly outspoken as a skeptic of the Bible, asserting that Jesus never intended to declare himself the son of God.)

  The Christian Examiner and Theological Review, an historically important journal of liberal Christianity with followers among Unitarians and also such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson of the Transcendental movement, praised the Harby address for holding “just and noble views of civil and religious liberty.” Harby’s peroration was noticed in Europe as well. A Brussels journal compared it to the Protestant Reformation and hailed Harby as someone who overcame the prejudices of his own religious heritage.5

  Another figure in the liberal Christian movement, the Reverend Samuel Gilman, Unitarian minister of the Second Independent Church of Charleston—later the Unitarian Church of Charleston—praised Harby’s “discourse” and also recounted his experience of attending services at Beth Elohim in an article in 1826 in the North American Review of Boston, perhaps the leading literary journal of its day.