City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

4 The Jewish Community and the American Revolution

71 In 1782, near the end of the War for Independence, Hazan Gershom Seixas, in exile in Philadelphia, studied the calculations of a German rabbi whose numerical analysis of the words of the book of Daniel concluded that the messiah would appear in 1783. At the same time, Seixas was working for reform of Pennsylvania ’s constitution to allow full political participation by Jewish citizens. Was the American Revolution a millennial sign of the return of Jews to Zion, or was it a sign of a new republican order and a new era in American Jewish history? The war, Seixas declared, was “a wonderful display of . . . divine providence,” an act of God whose ultimate meaning was yet to unfold.1 In 1760, the 250 Jews in New York City were, like most colonists, patriotic citizens of the British Empire and proud of the recent military conquest of Canada in the French and Indian War. Yet between 1765 and 1775, the majority of the Jewish community, like their Christian counterparts, turned from loyal Britons to rebellious Americans. In a long encounter that deeply altered the outlook and way of life of America’s foremost Jewish community, many of the city’s Jews endured exile and took to arms against their once-beloved mother country. Most New York Jews prospered during the late 1750s and early 1760s. Merchants gained fortunes on an unprecedented scale supplying his majesty’s forces in the struggle against the French and Spanish. However, the war’s end with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the departure of troops, and the cessation of expenditures triggered a severe recession in the American colonies. Strained by a large national debt, the British determined to tighten supervision of its C H A P T E R 4 The Jewish Community and the American Revolution 72 ■ h av e n o f l i b e r t y widening empire. Accordingly, it introduced measures that hit the economies of the colonies’ major seaports, including New York, which, by 1775, had grown to a population of twenty-five thousand, second only to Philadelphia’s forty thousand inhabitants.2 ■ The Coming of Revolution The 1764 Sugar Act, which not only increased the price of foreign molasses but also cracked down on smuggling, imposing onerous bonding procedures on coastal and Atlantic commercial shipping, came into effect as the economic slowdown began. The notorious Stamp Act followed in 1765, imposing duties on domestic wares such as newspapers and playing cards as well as on shipping documents. The impost hurt both the New York City’s commercial elite and ordinary citizens. Violating the colonists’ understanding that the mother county was a source of nurturance, it initiated a growing sense of alienation as British Americans saw their interests as distinct from those of Britons not residing in the colonies. These perceptions led to an intense constitutional examination, in the newspapers and colonial legislatures, of the rights of colonists. The Stamp Act also unleashed social friction among the lower and lower-middling classes. Taken aback by the militant reaction as Americans took to the streets and began a boycott of British shipping, the British repealed the Stamp Act. Unwisely they followed it with the Townshend Acts in 1767, a tax applying only to imports. This, too, triggered a strong reaction, a policy of nonimportation by merchants and artisans.3 As incident upon incident played out, the city’s Jewish mercantile elite, the leaders of their community, joined other merchants and artisans pondering how to respond to British policies. After passage of the Stamp Act, Jewish merchants were likely signers of a nonimportation resolution, though no lists are extant. After the Townshend Acts became law, ten prominent Jewish merchants, including Uriah Hendricks (later a loyalist), Hayman Levy, Jonas Phillips, and Manuel Josephson, joined 190 New York traders who pledged not to import “articles as are or may hereafter be subject to duty, for the purpose of raising revenue in America.” Sampson Simson served as one of the city’s mercantile spokesmen. Appealing to resistance to British measures, Jewish merchant Isaac Adolphus advertised his hosiery as “equal in price and superior in goodness to British goods, . . . which, if the Patriotic Americans should approve, large quantities can readily be furnished.”4 The Jewish Community and the American Revolution ■ 73 These Jewish merchants were part of the conservative wing of the growing revolutionary movement. They did not go as far as...