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

Conclusion: “Gone are the Living but the Dead Remain”: The Jewish Legacy in Nineteenth-Century New England

237 conclusion “Gone are The liVinG bUT The DeaD reMain” The Jewish Legacy in Nineteenth-Century New England  In February 1790 Manuel Josephson, president of Philadelphia’s Mikveh israel congregation, wrote to Moses Seixas of newport about the “capricious & whimsical disposition of some of the individuals” associated with the rhode island synagogue. The Philadelphian reflected on the liturgical dilemmas faced by all Jews living in the new World: “as to our north american congregations, not so much can be said . . . as in reality they have no regular system; chiefly owing (in my opinion) to the smallness of their numbers, & the frequent mutability of the members from one place to another—and as from their first establishment they had no fixed and permanent rules to go by, so they have continually remained in a state of fluctuation.”1 like so many other old World cultural phenomena in america, Judaism employed an improvisatory spirit as it sought to adapt its ancient rituals to a newly pluralistic social milieu. While most Jews in europe still lived apart from gentiles and were suffered, on that basis, to follow strong communal precedent, north american Jews had, as Jonathan Sarna puts it, “achieved an unprecedented degree of ‘equal footing ’ by the end of the eighteenth century.”2 as increasingly visible participants in rather than complete outsiders to the culture of the new nation, Jews were now taking their place within the nation’s panoply of rapidly democratizing sectarian interests. at the same time, though Jews were no longer mere figments of the Protestant imagination, the idea of Jews lived on as new englanders and other americans verbalized their ambivalent views regarding democracy, merchant capitalism, and national identity. even as Jewish congregations would increase dramatically in number 238 conclUSion and size over the coming decades (by 1820 the young republic’s Jewish population would grow fivefold, to approximately ten thousand), the central tenet underlying Josephson’s assessment would hold. extreme mobility , in combination with the unavailability of formal training (elsewhere in his letter, Josephson lamented the pattern by which each new Jewish arrival from the old World, believing “it next to impossible that any knowledge can be obtained out of europe,” would chastise more thoroughly americanized congregants for their extreme ignorance of traditional Judaism), necessitated the continual revision of american Jews’ religious and communal behavior. To non-Jews, Judaic liturgy still offered an object lesson in an alien ritual practice, and divisions among Jews would have been difficult to detect (among other changing circumstances, as early as 1790, when the first national census was conducted, ashkenazic Jews had begun to outnumber their Sephardic predecessors). notwithstanding their extreme numeric inferiority, however, Jews had built actual communitiesinnewYork ,newport,charleston,Savannah,richmond,lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia by the turn of the nineteenth century, and their worship services revealed them to at least some non-Jews as modern -day practitioners of a living faith as opposed to relics of a bygone era in a distant hemisphere. in the aftermath of Philadelphia’s Fourth of July parade in 1788, benjamin rush wrote famously about his sight of “the rabbi of the Jews locked in the arms of two ministers of the gospel”3 as members of that city’s churches marched together into the nation’s pluralistic future (in their ecumenical zeal, parade organizers had even seen to it that separate tables featuring kosher foods would be available to the Jews upon the conclusion of the actual parade). as much of the new nation, particularly under the sway of an enlightenment-informed Democraticrepublicanism , indulged a newly laissez-faire attitude toward religious profession, Jews saw their political fortunes rise and their economic opportunities expand in unprecedented ways outside New England. newport and new england more generally were less than central to the burgeoning of a newly american Judaism. The area’s long history as a calvinistic holdout, notwithstanding the growth even there of a small anglican (and, therefore, “cosmopolitan”) interest and rhode island’s ostensible indulgence of dissenters of every stripe, had never recommended it to practicing Jews in the first place. Jewish life in the rhode The Jewish Legacy in Nineteenth-Century New England 239 island port had reached its heyday in the years preceding the revolution, when aaron lopez and other scions of the transatlantic trade had established the colonies’ second synagogue in the midst of an anglicizing trend toward refinement and gentility. after the british occupation of newport, few...