Conflicts Between Jews and Christians and Within the Jewish Community in America

A generation ago the wisdom of the profession was that minority groups should not study their own history. In many cases — among them the history of American Jewry — such courses of study were regarded as unimportant, and in any case, it was felt that members of these groups could not be objective scholars about the enclaves to which they belonged. Not long after Irish-American historians wrote about the Irish-American experience in this country, and African-American historians explored their own past, Jewish-American historians began to examine their people’s life in America. Jews in Christian America and A People Divided are products of the proliferating and now professionally respected field of American Jewish studies.

A felicitous and accurate capsulization of Jews in Christian America is Jerold Auerbach’s dust jacket comment that the book is an “analysis of the enduring tension between religious identity and civic obligation.” Beginning in colonial times and ending in the 1960s, Naomi W. Cohen investigates an important phase of the quest of the Jews to be equal citizens of America. She focuses on federal, state, and local legislation and adjudication on church-state issues that concerned Jewish-Gentile relationships, and traces the movement from toleration to equality of Jewish aspirations and actions. Since the formation of the republic, Jews pursued two strategies to gain total acceptance. In the nineteenth century they sought government neutrality toward all sects, and in the twentieth they worked for a separation of religion and state. Although these were dominant trends, they were not uniformly pursued by Jews. Differences within the Jewish community over accommodation versus confrontation, assimilationism versus distinctiveness, and orthodoxy versus secularism sometimes led to disunity, temporizing, or to disputes over separation between church and state versus equal protection for all religions — or at least for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. An integral benefit of this acutely reasoned work is the discussion of America as a Christian country. Those who doubt that it is, or that it was until recently, will have to confront Cohen’s formidable and intelligently presented data on this issue.

Cohen’s investigation is especially valuable because it comprehends Christian as well as Jewish attitudes and actions on the issues she discusses. Sometimes this interaction is a true dialogue, but more often each side speaks past the other — to sway public opinion or appeal to civic authority. The key matters addressed in Jews in Christian America are Sunday laws, prayer, Bible reading, and released time for religious instruction in public schools. These are all ably and fully presented in their cultural, legal, and political dimensions. Vital as they are, however, they by no means exhaust all the significant aspects of the experience of Jews in Christian America. When explored over several hundred years of American history they become repetitious. But this is a mild reservation about an excellent book.

Other critical points are even more incidental. Conversion to Christianity is a possible, not a probable (p. 16), cause for Jacob Lumbrozo escaping death for blasphemy. A general amnesty at the accession of Richard Cromwell is a more likely explanation. A more rounded view of Hezekiah Niles would have shown that in addition to being “a supporter of Jewish rights” (p. 40), he also expressed anti-Semitic feelings in his weekly. The statement that American Jews waited until “well into the 20th century” to openly admit their collective interests” and not divide “the Jewish world into American-or-public and Jewish-or-private orbits” (p. 51), although not an inaccurate assessment of the comparative self-confidence of Jews since the 1960s, overstates the case. Mordecai Noah, the leading Jewish public figure of the Jacksonian era, could be seen as a partial contradiction of Cohen’s judgment. A final mild mishap in Jews in Christian...