Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History

Chapter 4: Jewish Prosperity in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1675–1775

C H A P T E R 4 Jewish Prosperity in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1675–1775 On 11 March 1669, the eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina—a province then encompassing a great swathe of land between Virginia and Florida—published The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. The chief Lord Proprie­ tor, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–83), wrote it with the assistance of no less a contributor than John Locke (1632–1704). The political remit of this text, with its peculiar amalgam of nascent liberalism and feudal restrictions, was limited and soon abandoned by the colonists. But what concerns us is the two authors’ strong endorsement of religious freedom, which had a far more lasting trajectory in American experience. While the Fundamental Constitutions officially established the Church of England, “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion” were guaranteed tolerance in Carolina. Article Ninety-Seven declares that “any seven or more persons agreeing in any religion, shall constitute a church or profession, to which they shall give some name, to distinguish it from others.”1 This tolerance was seen as an inseparable element of the familiar Lockean pursuit of “life, liberty, and property.” In a sense the Cooper-Locke headcount (“seven . . . shall constitute a church”) was less stringent than Judaism’s minyan (specifying ten congregants to begin a prayer service). The colonial assembly never ratified the Fundamental Constitutions. Nevertheless, as aspiration, Article NinetySeven lived on, with religiopolitical tenets eventually permeating the civil society that would emerge not only in the Carolinas, but in many of England’s Atlantic colonies. England’s tolerance, we have seen time and again, was preceded by that of the Netherlands. Starting with the Union of Utrecht (1579), the Republic of the Seven United Provinces asserted freedom of conscience as axial despite state confessional policy: this was notional. In practice Dutch Reformed Protestantism was frequently empowered to the disadvantage of Catholicism. Yet in an age of religious wars, the seventeenth-century Dutch were increasingly committed to accepting personal religious conviction as unassailable. In the event, far across the Atlantic, it would be the projection of precisely this Anglo-Dutch tolerance that provided a bedrock for Jewish settlement in the Jewish Prosperity in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1675–1775 121 Americas. We have only to look at the fine synagogues built on both sides of the Atlantic, notably in Amsterdam, London, Rhode Island, and Curaçao, to appreciate the power and permanence of this new, inclusive social contract. Jewish Life in the Dutch Empire In 1675, when architect-builder Elias Bouman completed the Esnoga, that luminous Baroque monument of Amsterdam Jewry, the aesthetic achievement was quickly prized in a city of great churches—that is, in a society for which mature religious architecture must express piety, praise, and gratitude before the divine transparently and convincingly. Upon completion, the Esnoga stood as one of the largest synagogues in the world. Its design would offer a template for synagogue construction throughout the Sephardic Atlantic World, whether in Dutch or English territories, for almost 150 years. After decades of military (often naval) conflict, the Anglo-Dutch convergence of 1689 under William III of Orange and his wife, Mary II (of the House of Stuart), meant that colonization and economic development in the Americas could coexist, if competitively, between the two maritime Protestant powers . In any case, the great era of Dutch expansion into the New World was waning. It would be France that rose to contest Britain for dominance, especially in North America, during the eighteenth century. But in precisely this The floor plan of the Esnoga and its dependencies, designed by Elias Bouman, as it appeared in the late seventeenth century. This plan was copied for synagogue design across the Atlantic World. This floor plan is a detail from the etching The Inauguration of the Esnoga in 1675, by Romeyn de Hooghe. William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection, Special Collections, College of Charleston Library. 122 Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World period, as far as Jews were concerned, neither Canada, nor Louisiana, nor the Atlantic seaboard figured as the center of settlement. That—quite unexpectedly from any rigid Anglo-American historiographic perspective—was located on the distant northeastern coastal shelf of South America—in Dutch Surinam . Its capital, Paramaribo, on the Surinam River, flows into the Atlantic only nine and a half miles away. The city’s Jews were mostly traders, transatlantic shippers, skilled craftsmen, and...