Jews and Gentiles in Early America: 1654-1800 (review)

In this well written and researched history of the formative years of Jewish colonial and Federal period contact and settlement, Pennsylvania State University Professor William Pencak provides the reader with a clear, incisive summary of social and political interaction between Jews and their neighbors. Jews were a small fraction of the general population, less than one half of one percent of some five million in 1800, even less in 1700; yet they had a considerable influence in the world about them. As prejudicial barriers were lifted, society as a whole benefited, as is so evident in these pages. Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century century Dutch Jewish liberal, observed that where freedom of religion is an established principle, society flourishes. Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century reaped the rewards of these republican ideas; and, as freedom emerged in this country as a basic right, the newly created nation prospered. Yet, there was opposition to establishing in this country a more open society. Intolerance and antisemitic attitudes were part of the social fabric, and it is this resistance to acceptance that is at the center of this volume. Pencak carefully details that antagonism by looking at Jews and Gentiles in five cities: New York, Newport, Charleston, Philadelphia, and Savannah. Boston is omitted since this "New Zion" could not accept Jews even though the Puritans saw themselves culturally as descendants of the ancient Hebrews. Boston did not have a Jewish congregation until the nineteenth century.

The author begins his narrative in New York as the earliest and surely the most important of such communities. In 1654, the first few Jews arrived from Amsterdam, quickly followed by refugees from Portuguese Brazil. In New Amsterdam a struggle with Director General Peter Stuyvesant over citizenship and the right to remain ended with a victory for the new arrivals, though everyone except the founding father of American Judaism, Asser Levy, quickly left the city. A first small congregation was established in New York in the late 1690s. A later congregation Shearith Israel was formed in 1728.

Only after the English conquest of 1664 did the community become permanent. A good part of the New York story centers on the Jacob and Abigail Franks family and the marriage of a daughter, Phila, to Oliver Delancey, an Anglican and member of the propertied establishment that governed the province. Then a son, David, married into the wealthy Evans family of Philadelphia. The children of both marriages were Christians, and, in fact, by the end of the eighteenth century all members of the family were Christian. These events raise an interesting question—do tolerance and acceptance lead to ending or eroding Jewish identification?

Pencak's basic concern, however, is evidence of antisemitism; and he asks which social or political factions, elitist or populist, were more accepting of Judaism. Seemingly the elites were more supportive. For example, in Rhode Island, as in all the other places the author notes, it was usually the ruling class, the elites, who were less of a danger to Jews than a "populist regime" (113). Thomas Jefferson, an ardent republican like Thomas Paine, was highly critical of Jews viewing them as "repulsive and anti-social . . . their ideas of God degrading and injurious" (10). Jews, Jefferson thought, were also greedy and dishonest. Yet, Jefferson supported religious freedom and independence, a dilemma indeed. But that was typically Jefferson.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the charter or Constitution of 1669, given to the proprietors by the Crown, provided freedom of religion to Jews and Dissenters. The Trade and Navigation Act of 1696 granted freedom of trade to naturalized citizens, especially to Jews and French Huguenots. These decisions had the support of the aristocratic Anglican elite. In opposition were more republican, more "democratic" Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Quakers who sought to limit naturalization including the right to vote. For them an election held in the early eighteenth century was lost due to allowing "Jews, Strangers, Sailors, Servants, Negroes & almost every French man" a...