Jews in Nevada: A History

Introduction Celebrating Tradition and Resisting Assimilation

9  0 Nevada Jewry would not have existed without millions of its ancestors maintaining Judaism. Comprehending its history requires some understanding of the milestones remembered for more than two millennia and the struggle for acceptance in a Christian world. There were also the lures of accommodation or assimilation, especially in the isolation of Nevada’s desert, where Torah study and kosher diets were among the 63 religious duties (mitzvoth) fondly remembered but rarely observed. Sabbath observance was a sign of the covenant of Yahweh with Moses on Sinai. Passover marked the angel of death “passing over” Egyptian Jewish households and the subsequent Exodus toward a promised land. The Jews celebrated their redemption from extermination in a later dispersion, as described in the book of Esther, as the Feast of Purim and observed it with gusto even in Nevada’s most depressing years. By the time Jews suffered the Jerusalem temple destruction in 72 ce, they were no longer exclusively agrarian. They were artisans, traders, and more. Religiously, Jews retained some visionary relationship to a homeland without a temple and evolved into a “People of the Book”—not unlike Christians and Muslims. They remained, however, strangers in many countries, and antisemitism was a constant companion. Christian Antisemitism The cultural and religious bias against Jews was born in the first century of the Common Era. Many early Christians considered themselves one of several Jewish sects. An early dispute in the primitive church was between “Judaizers,” who thought it necessary for Christians to observe Jewish law, and those, like Paul, who treated Jesus’ teaching as a new revelation freeing Gentiles from any allegiance to the “old” Testament (Gal. 2). Elsewhere, Peter twice condemned the Jews for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah and Celebrating Tradition and Resisting Assimilation I N t r o d u c t I o N jews in nevada 9 2 0 blamed them for his death (Acts 3:4–6, 5:30). In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jews are recorded as having said of Jesus: “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25). Christians now had a scriptural basis for blaming Jews as “Christ-killers,” but there was more to come. It took several hundred years for Christianity to sort out the issue of Jesus’ relationship to God. The Council of Nicea (325 ce) defined the ambiguous attribution of Jesus as “Son of God” to mean he was both human and equal to Yahweh. Arian Christians, the majority in some quarters of Christendom, considered Jesus divine but not equal to God. For these Arians as well as all practicing Jews, the notion that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could in any way be human was unthinkable. Nevertheless, the Nicene Creed emerging from the council cemented the identity of Jesus and Yahweh and opened Jews to vilification and charges of deicide. Constantinople’s Archbishop John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407 ce) characterized Jews as having “all the vices of beasts and are good for nothing but slaughter. . . . They behave no better than pigs in their lewd vulgarities.”1 Throughout the Middle Ages, zealous Christians extended their ideological differences with Judaism by making Jews scapegoats for many disasters and killed thousands of them without cause or remorse. However, some Christians tolerated Jews for their mercantile skills and as lenders of money—a usurious practice that non-Jews considered sinful. Roman Catholic liturgy, however, kept alive the common reference to the Jews as faithless. Popes, monks, and kings organized crusades to capture the Holy Land with orders that “infidels”—whether Islamic or Jewish—choose between Christian baptism and the sword. Theologians like Thomas Aquinas justified these “holy wars,” arguing that anyone who heard the Gospel and refused to accept it lost the right to property and freedom. Later, English Reformer John Wycliffe (330–384) stated that such a refusal deprived one of the right to life itself. Martin Luther reminded Christians in 542 that “you have no enemy more cruel, more venomous and virulent, than a true Jew.” As Luther’s recent biographers have noted, such unbridled attacks on Jews reflected contemporary thought and polemic. Shakespeare’s depiction of Shylock as “stiff-necked” had its basis in Yahweh’s many such characterizations of his chosen people. The notion that Shylock was consumed with exacting his usurious “pound of [Christian] flesh” easily became a stereotype of all Jews.2 More important, on the eve of European [3.129.249.105] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01...