more interesting case was that of Mordecai Noah, the first Jew to have diplomatic status, whom James Monroe removed as US Consul in Tunis in 1815 on the grounds that ‘the Religion which you profess [is] an obstacle to the exercise of your consular functions’. Noah did not take this lying down and wrote a pamphlet about it. He was the first American Jew to emerge as a larger-than-life figure. A hundred years later he would certainly have become a movie mogul. As it was he was born in Philadelphia in 1785, son of a bankrupt pedlar. He was in turn a gilder, carver, clerk in the US Treasury,
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