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8 1 Jerusalem across the Sea To the first Jewish settlers onAmerica’s shores,anti-­Semitism was a disease of the Old World. Small in number, America’s earliest Jewish immigrants arrived from the Iberian Peninsula and the former Spanish possession of the Netherlands. They and succeeding waves of Jewish immigrants found a welcoming nation and an open frontier. They also discovered that the seeds of prejudice, like any other cargo, traveled safely across the Atlantic. The tiny Jewish settlement in New Amsterdam—­ destined to be the heart of American Jewish life as New York—­ faced a particularly harsh Governor Peter Stuyvesant. However, his attempt to kick out the Jews was overturned by the Dutch West India Company, which recognized the need to protect anyone who was engaged in profitable trade.1 Jews constituted a small community—­ no more than between fifteen hundred and two thousand individuals out of a total population of just over two million at the time of the American Revolution.But in the United States,unlike much of Europe, Jews were free to marry, enter business relations, and worship publicly. One of the main acts of the Congress established under the Articles of Confederation was to guarantee religious freedom in all territories and states.2 Jews in most states could vote and run for office and, unlike in Europe, mixed freely with Christians in commercial and social settings.When the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, the new document—­ and its authors—­ provided for religious freedom. As historian Jonathan Sarna notes, “whatever [the Founding Fathers] personally thought of Jews,” they received “full equality .”3 George Washington affirmed in a 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, that the new nation would be committed to religious liberty: The government would provide“to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”4 Jerusalem across the Sea 9 However, Jews in some states struggled for full equality through the middle of the nineteenth century. In Maryland, the issue of Jewish political rights was fought inconclusively between 1797 and 1826, when those rights were finally guaranteed through the“Jew bill,”which allowed Jews to hold office. Jews had to wait even longer for the right to hold office in Rhode Island (1842),North Carolina (1868), and New Hampshire (1877) Periodic attempts occurred to amend the Constitution to declare the United States a Christian country,but all failed.5 “A Rascally Jew in Every Cheap Novel” American Jews were not completely free from the literary imagery common in Europe at the time, whether as Shylock or crucifier. The stereotype of the Jewish pawnbroker and small-­ scale trader became a facet of American culture by the early nineteenth century. As early as the late 1840s, caricatures of Jewish peddlers began to appear in popular songs, plays, and stories, and the verb to Jew, meaning“to cheat,” was becoming a common part of American slang. Walt Whitman speaks disparagingly of Jewish glaziers in Lower Manhattan crying out “glass to mend.” Herman Melville’s 1849 novel, Redburn: His First Voyage, describes New York’s Chatham Street with its“hook-­ nosed” pawnbrokers.6 Writer and diarist John Beauchamp Jones, a vocal antebellum and wartime anti-­ Semite, penned a series of novels that demonstrated his contempt for Jewish merchants in the rural South.Jones,a Confederate official in Richmond,kept a record of his experiences during the war and in one case characterized Jews as “extortioners engaged in illicit trade” and draft dodgers“fleeing from Richmond with the money they have made.” In his 1849 book, Western Merchant, Jones uses the stock images of physical description to denigrate the Jewish merchant, referring to his “prominent nose, high cheek bones and small sparkling eyes”; this “cunning Jew, [was] in quest of a location to cheat his neighbors and spoil the regular trader’s business.” Such actions, says Jones, are“characteristic of the peddling Jews.” In Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant, Jones also refers to Jews speaking in exaggerated German accents and burning down their businesses to collect insurance money. In yet another novel, Border War, written in 1859, Jones compares Jews purchasing real estate at an auction to vultures.7 The vulture image, in both illustration and words, would reappear in its most vitriolic forms during the Civil War as anti-­ Semitic tensions increased.8 On the stage, Jews were portrayed in a mostly unflattering manner. Both American theatergoers and those in Europe saw the Jew as the ever-­ present Shylock, Shakespeare’s...

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