New Israel / New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America

Chapter 4. “A Handsome Assembly of People”: Jewish Settlement and the Refinement of New England Culture

121 chapter four “a hanDSoMe aSSeMblY oF PeoPle” Jewish Settlement and the Refinement of New England Culture  The development of a viable Jewish community in newport, rhode island, in the 1750s coincided with what one historian has famously described as the evolution of religiously pious Puritans into commercially enterprising Yankees.1 ironically, this increase in Jewish visibility also coincided with the greatest revival of the Protestant faith to occur during the entire colonial era. Jonathan edwards, the foremost thinker of this revival, had taken at least passing notice of the growing Jewish presence in british north america. in 1722, two years after he graduated from Yale college and while serving as an apprentice pastor to a group of english Presbyterians, edwards spent some months living in new York, next door to a Jew. Years later, in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), he recounted the experience. edwards must have been something of a nosy neighbor. While studying or resting in his quarters, he “had much opportunity daily to observe [the Jew], who appeared to me to be the devoutest person i ever saw in my life; a great part of his time being spent in acts of devotion, at his eastern window, which opened next to mine, seeming to be most earnestly engaged, not only in the daytime but sometimes whole nights.”2 edwards’s physical encounter with the religious habits of a Jew in north america was an apt illustration of the fact that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the People of israel were gaining visibility as practitioners of a living, if divergent faith. For their part, new Yorkers would eventually grow so used to the idea of Jewish worship in the context of an ever-expanding panoply of religious alignments that one of them would include the “Jew’s Synagogue” in a panoramic 1771 woodblock print of that city’s spire-dominated skyline—the twelfth in an enumeration of 122 chaPTer FoUr twenty-one architectural landmarks, a mere two of which were not houses of worship. if new england was still a world apart in edwards’s day, it would not be long before its Protestant inhabitants would be forced into an encounter with the inadvertently pluralistic legacy that their forebears’ dissenting tradition had wrought. as the influence of british colonial authority and of english culture grew, political expediency had made an expansion of religious tolerance necessary, especially in rhode island, whose charter contained no stated impediments to the settlement of “Jews, Turks, and infidels.” by 1759, new england would have its first formally constituted Jewish congregation. Four years later the Jews of newport solidified their claim to permanence in new england by building the shrine to colonial gentility and Judaic heritage that would come to be called the Touro Synagogue. While edwards and several other instigators of the mideighteenth -century Great awakening had been raised in and had instilled in them the unique tradition of new england Puritanism, their revival far exceeded the geographical boundaries and theological parameters of new england. an expansion of commercial and cultural ties between north america, the West indies, and the entire british atlantic resulted in the diminishment of new england’s sense not only of its influence but of its owncultural,economic,andreligiousautonomy.Thus,theverymovement whose foremost ministers were poised to import a revitalized Puritanism throughout the colonies was, at the same time, the product and most evident symbol of new england’s very eclipse. The formal establishment of new england’s first Jewish congregation, though it bore no direct connection to the awakening itself, manifested many of the same cultural trends that fueled the Protestant revival, and it also offered further evidence of new england’s absorption into the larger atlantic world. Despite his lifelong devotion to the study of hebrew,3 edwards was no admirer of Jews, and his description of his Jewish neighbor was pointed. he deployed it in order to challenge his audience, reminding them that the most devoted outward show of christian religiosity, like the christless davening of a Jew, was devoid of spiritual import and, often enough, a means of concealment as opposed to a demonstration of true piety. in his autobiographical writings and sermons, edwards had often sounded a similar note, holding out the example of his own youthful “affections” of Jewish Settlement and the Refinement of New England Culture 123 religiosity in order to confront his hearers with the...