Kindle Notes & Highlights
It was a Magna Carta for Jews and Marranos. Jews
The demand for copies of the Bible in the vernacular was so great that the Wycliffe Bible was often chained to an altar to prevent it from being stolen.
Tyndale used the Greek and Hebrew texts, producing such a beautiful translation that it became the basis for the King James
The Dutch and British hit upon another system of administration. These governments made contracts with businessmen for the commercial exploitation of the Colonies. Thus the “chartered company” was born, marking a revolution in commercial and government theory.
Charter holders could buy land without limitations. They could enact laws for the territory, provided none clashed with the laws of England, and they could fine and punish individuals. In return for these privileges, those holding the charters had certain obligations—to act as the “English nation” in the territory, to settle the territory, to develop a profitable trade for the mother country, to make payments in gold and silver to England (usually one-tenth of profits), and to take an oath of allegiance to the crown.
In the British colonies anyone could settle, whatever one’s religion. The Spanish and Portuguese used the criterion of nationality or religion (or both) to exclude
They did not realize that in such vast territories it made little difference how people worshipped God, provided they tamed the wilderness and made it productive.
The deciding factor was the fairness of the Dutch.
In 1730, the first official Jewish synagogue, Shearith Israel (The Remnant of Israel), was built on a site now occupied by one of Wall Street’s magnificent buildings. Still in existence, this congregation is the oldest in the United States, but now located on Central Park West.
When Williams founded Providence, and later Rhode Island, it became perhaps the first place in the world where there was almost total separation of church and state, with equal opportunity for all, except for slaves.
They did not get around to building a synagogue until 1763. Touro Synagogue still stands, a beautiful example of Colonial architecture. It was declared a national historic site in 1946.
In 1750, on the day of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, the Jews dedicated their first synagogue in Charleston, destined to become in less than a century the first Reform temple in the United States.
“There shall be liberty of conscience in the worship of God in all persons. . . except Papists.”
The social gulf between the elite English Sephardi Jews and these German Jews was vastly greater than that between the Sephardim and the Gentile nobility.
But Savannah, founded by Oglethorpe, was destined to become a cultural center for Colonial and antebellum American Jews.
Pennsylvania’s first Jewish congregation was founded in Philadelphia in 1745.
By the time of the Revolution, there were Jewish congregations in these five most tolerant Colonies—New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It is interesting to note that there were no Jewish congregations in Massachusetts until after the Revolution, for the Puritans were religious bigots in spite of their democratic politics.
they accepted the Congregationalist way of looking at God, synagogue, and state.
The Sephardi Jews had no ghetto tradition or mentality because there had been no ghettos in fifteenth-century Spain or Portugal.*
The frontier was an escape route from servitude.
The colonists became a powerful middle class of farmers, tradesmen, artisans, and entrepreneurs.
Medicine, law, engineering, and architecture were rarely Jewish professions in Colonial America.
At the time of the Revolution, 50 percent of the American people were slaves or indentured servants.
Anti-Semitism was almost nonexistent in Colonial America.
The early Jewish settlers in America did not recreate the religious society of European Jewry; they created a secular Jewish-American society, one in which the Old World rabbi would have few functions.
Colonial Judaism was more or less “made up” by the settlers, who drew on remembrance of things past.
the Colonial Jews did not have the piety of the European Jews.
Rebecca Samuel rejoiced because there were no rabbis in America to force her to do things she did not want to do. She was willing to dispense with rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism, but not Judaism itself.
Benjamin Nones was a French Jew from Bordeaux. Joining the Continental Army as a private, he became a major, served on Washington’s staff, and distinguished himself for bravery in the siege of Savannah.
This high percentage of intermarriage shows both a Jewish and Christian acceptance of one another as marriage partners.
When the American Revolution broke out, a new era dawned for the Jews. Instead of declining, their numbers increased.
The American Revolution was more a rebellion than a revolution.
In 1775, the per capita tax on the British was fifty times that paid by the Americans.
The colonists were objecting to a potential tyranny rather than an actual one.
In fact, after the war, the Americans had to tax themselves more severely than the British had.
There is no way of determining exactly how many Jews were Tories, or loyalists, and how many were Whigs, or separatists. In a sense, the Revolution was also a civil war, which set family against family, friend against friend. The loyalist Jews, many from England, were grateful to England for the security it had offered them and found it difficult to take up arms against the mother country. The Jews from the Dutch Colonies and from Spain, who owed no such loyalty, found it easier to side with those in favor of separation. The majority of the Jews were, however, Whigs.
Article VI, paragraph 3 states: .. . no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. And the First Amendment states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof.
The article opened a path for Jews in government—administrative, judicial, and legislative. The amendment opened new horizons for Judaism.
High moral standards prevailed. Though murder, robbery, and rape were rampant outside ghetto walls, such crimes were practically nonexistent inside. But ghetto life itself was demeaning.
The purist orthodox were bystanders hitching a historical free ride while vilifying their saviors.
The answer is simple: the Protestant Reformation.
And as one heretic sect after another arose in those areas where the Jews were most numerous, the Church began to associate Christian heresy with Jewish influences.
because he was sincerely convinced that his Protestantism was a return to authentic Judaism. Similar
Luther turned against them with a paranoid hatred.
The first step was the segregation of the Jews in the ghettos, the first such enclaves in Europe.
Thus, without a master plan, within one century the isolation of the Jews was achieved. The ghetto was the end of the line. The Jew became Europe’s forgotten people.
But as he could not accept ghetto orthodoxy, he fashioned a philosophy
for a modern orthodoxy that would permit Judaism to coexist with Western civilization. This was the beginning of German “Reform” Judaism.
Mendelssohn became the first Jew in Jewish history to advocate the separation of church and state, the separation of Talmud and rabbi from education. In no way, however, did he reject the basic principles of Judaism.
