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Chapter One ''TRUE AMERICANISM" The Foundations ofthe Civic Culture JACOB De La Motta was only thirty-one but already a distinguished doctor with a substantial practice in Savannah, Georgia, and other cities when he was chosen to give the address at the consecration of a new synagogue in Savannah on July 21, 1820. The physician wondered at the good fortune of Jews in the new republic, who, for the first time in history, "stood on the same eminence with other sects." So taken was La Motta with his own discourse, in which he praised the Constitution as the "palladium of our rights," that he sent it to ex-presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two ofthe most distinguished living Americans . Within a month, Madison thanked him for the copy of his talk, pointing out that the experience of the Jews in Savannah showed that "equal laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be presumed , the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country." A few weeks later, Jefferson wrote that he saw confirmation oftwo fundamental truths in La Motta's letter: "that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is 'divided we stand, united, we fall.''' The sage of Monticello hoped that Jews would soon be "taking their seats . . . at the board of government."1 Jews, who had been expelled from every major nation of Europe, and who, when permitted to live in them, were usually denied fundamental rights, by 1820 had become active in the politics of several communities in the V.S.2 Although they came from different national backgrounds and religious orientations and were scattered throughout the country, Jews were developing a surer, clearer sense of their relationship to other Jews in the country-becoming ethnic-while at the same time developing a growing sense of loyalty to the V.S. in a process of ethnicAmericanization that was first nurtured mainly in colonial Pennsylvania. Three Ideas About Immigrants andMembership: Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania The Pennsylvania idea was that all white European settlers were welcome into the colony on terms of equal rights. Fueled by the desire of 7 8 VOLUNTARY PLURALISM early white settlers for additional immigrants to build a nation and generate prosperity, the Pennsylvania idea would become the basis for U.S. immigration and naturalization policy for white Europeans after the founding of the republic. But the Pennsylvania idea was in competition with two other ideas, the first of which gained prominence in colonial Massachusetts, and the second mainly in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland, called here the Virginia idea. To oversimplify: Pennsylvania sought immigrants who would be good citizens regardless of religious background; Massachusetts wanted as members only those who were religiously pure; and Virginia, with its increasing reliance on a plantation economy, wanted workers as cheaply as it could get them, without necessarily welcoming them to membership in the community. Early Puritan Massachusetts, believing that the success ofits settlement would depend upon the fulfillment of its covenant with God, welcomed only those newcomers who accepted the stringent beliefs and practices of that theocratic community (it turned back sixty English Protestant passengers on the ship Handmaid because of insufficient testimony as to their character and godliness).3 Since the Puritan church was an exclusive fellowship restricted to those who convincingly said they had been redeemed by the saving grace of God and who demonstrated their experience in the ways of grace, not everyone who was permitted to settle was admitted to church membership, a prerequisite for participation in the political community. The Massachusetts approach became influential in the development of a national ideology of Americanism, but it was too restrictive to form a dominant immigration and naturalization policy for the middle and northern colonies, which sought, not an ideal community (to say nothing of a Utopian one), but capital expansion. Since permanent settlers were valuable economic assets, exclusion ofimmigrants on the basis ofreligion seemed to make little economic sense. When local settlers or colonial governors tried to maintain religious exclusivity, investors sometimes countermanded them, as in New Netherlands, where Peter Stuyvesant wanted to bar Jews (and Lutherans) but was obliged to accept them by his sponsors. Maryland, with Catholics in power, excluded Jews from membership; but when a Jewish physician, Jacob Lambrow, was tried for blasphemy in 1658, he was acquitted and permitted to...

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