American Jewish Origins, 1654-1820

A year after his inauguration as president, George Washington visited the Newport, Rhode Island Jewish Congregation, Jeshuat Israel, in 1790. He went in response to a letter he had received from the leaders of that synagogue as well those of Mickve Israel in Savannah, Georgia. In their letters they wished him well as the first president of the new nation, expressing their warm feelings toward him. They begged him to remember that Jews, though small in number, lived in the United States, with its vast Christian majority. What, they asked him, would be their status? How would they, despite the many differences between themselves and their American neighbors, fit in to the nation’s whole?

Washington’s answer has been enshrined in American Jewish history, cited repeatedly as a guarantee of not tolerance, but equality. He wrote, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” [1]

Their letters reflected the Jews’ ambiguous history in the British colonies of America since the mid-seventeenth century. The first contingent of Jews, consisting of twenty-three individuals, came in the fall of 1654 to New Amsterdam, then a Dutch colony, in which the Dutch Reformed Church had great political sway. Although within ten years New Amsterdam would fall to British forces, who renamed it New York, the legacy of what happened on that day in 1654 reverberated in the consciousness of the Rhode Island and Georgia Jews, as well as those in Philadelphia, Charleston, and Richmond, Virginia, in 1790.

The governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, did not want the Jews to stay there. He called them a “deceitful race.”[2] While the Dutch West India Company, which owned the colony, instructed him to let them remain, it placed some restrictions on them. Among the limits to their civic life, the agreement to let them stay stipulated that they could not worship in public, although they could pray as they wanted in private, and could not serve in guard, the equivalent of the police.

These strictures were never enforced, and more severe limits had been imposed on Lutherans who could not even pray in private. But in what really mattered, the Jews, most of whom were of Sephardic, that is, Spanish and Portuguese background, participated actively and successfully in the economic life of the colony, using their Jewish contacts around the world to import and export goods and to enrich the coffers of New Amsterdam and its successor. Likewise, the minority of them of Ashkenazi, or German background, also successfully established businesses. They would become the majority in the Jewish community decades after the Dutch left and the British took over. Notably, African enslavement flourished there, both before and after the British seizure in 1664.  

Throughout the colonial period Jews lived in a few port cities in mainland North America, with others spread through the British colonies in the Caribbean. That reflected their economic niche in the world of commerce. They established communities in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston, with a congregation forming in Richmond the decade before the American Revolution. In each place one synagogue served all the Jews, whether Sephardim or Ashkenazim. All the synagogues adhered to ritual modes of Spain and Portugal and men whose roots lay in the Iberian Peninsula ran the congregations. This continued even when Jews from the German lands became the majority in the mid-eighteenth century.

These congregations provided all Jewish services, religious, educational, and charitable, and not until the early nineteenth century did Jews in any of these cities form either second synagogues or Jewish institutions outside of the congregation. In the colonial era, individual Jews had to belong to the one synagogue in their city, if they wanted their sons to be circumcised, their children educated in Jewish texts, to receive charity if needed, get kosher food, or be buried in the consecrated Jewish cemetery.

The Jewish congregations in the colonial period, and indeed into the 1850s, had no rabbis to serve the members. Most, at times, employed a hazzan, or a cantor, who chanted the service and generally represented the Jews to the city and colony. If no trained cantor could be found, individual members served that function, if they could. There were a few trained men who could perform the ritual of circumcision, the brit milah, and others who could slaughter animals according to the kosher laws. When no one could do this, kosher meat had to be imported, at great cost, from Europe.

Small groups of trustees, nearly always well-off merchants, ran the synagogue. They sought to maintain adherence to Jewish law, whether in terms of members observing the Saturday Sabbath or Jewish dietary laws, kashrut. Over time individual Jews grew dissatisfied with this kind of rule of the wealthy men, and, notably after national independence and the ratification of the Constitution, groups of Jews in each city broke off and created new congregations with different governance structures.    

Jews seem to have been well integrated and comfortable. Business partnerships existed between Jews and non-Jews and a certain amount of socializing went on. But Jews did not necessarily have the same political rights as other White men of their class, with the restrictions they faced whether in terms of voting in colonial legislatures or serving on juries or in office. No one pattern existed and each colony had its own set of policies which changed over time toward the Jews, non-Christians who could, for example, swear the required oaths on the King James Bible.

At times newspapers and other organs of public discourse spewed ugly words about the Jews and condemnations of Judaism as a religion that rejected the truth of the divinity of Jesus. But in no colony did authorities limit Jews’ access to where they could live, how they could make their living, or practice the rites of their faith. The authorities in America and in England for the most part saw the Jews as contributors to the economic life of each colony and proffered to them relatively broad tolerance despite their small numbers and obvious outsider status when it came to the important matter of religion. Even those colonies that supported an established church did nothing to quash the freedom of Jews to participate in social, economic, or religious activities.

Because of that generally benign attitude with which they lived and the limited restrictions they had to deal with, many Jews supported Britain in the move toward American independence, but probably equal numbers identified with the cause of their American neighbors who sought to sever their bonds with the Empire. The Jews divided among themselves. Some indeed left upon the American victory while other individuals fought with the Americans, dying in battle.

Not surprisingly, then, the trustees of the synagogues in Savannah and Newport wondered what their status would be in the new nation. But several developments that preceded George Washington’s words should have eased their anxieties.

First, in 1787, under the Articles of Confederation, which would shortly be replaced with the US Constitution, Congress designated in an ordinance the Northwest Territory, a swathe of land around the Great Lakes that would become the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In this legislation, which set the standards for how new lands would be incorporated into the United States, Congress mandated religious freedom, something obviously very important to Jews who were beginning to move beyond the Atlantic seaboard.

Then, the United States Constitution, written and ratified that same decade, stated that the nation would have no religious test for office. Other than that, the founding document made no mention of religion. The phrase in the preamble “We the People” did not exclude anyone by religion. So too the Bill of Rights guaranteed that Congress would do nothing to either stifle the free exercise of religion or establish any religion that would place one faith tradition over all others.

Notably this applied only to Congress, but it would also cover all the territories in the West that the United States expected to acquire. The thirteen colonies that became the first states could still, on the state level, maintain both religious qualifications for political participation and support of an established church. However, over the course of the decades from the adoption of the Constitution through the 1820s, most of those original states dropped these as the reality of universal White male suffrage became the norm.

One of the first acts of the new Congress, the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790, set the standards by which men born abroad could become naturalized, that is, qualified for citizenship. It said nothing about religion and did not mention Jews. By these omissions, Jews fell into the privileged category of “free white persons of good character.” Nothing stood in the way of Jews to come to the United States and take advantage of freedom.  

To demonstrate the political integration of the Jews into the nation on a symbolic, yet powerful level, when Pennsylvania held a mass parade to celebrate its ratification of the Constitution, Gershon Mendes Seixas, the hazzan of New York’s Shearith Israel, whose members had fled when the British occupied New York, marched at the head the procession. He linked arms with notable Christian clergy and at the end of the spectacle, a feast lay prepared for all the celebrants. A kosher table had been prepared so Seixas and the other Jews could adhere to their religious strictures while being part of the American whole.

The same years still saw occasional outbursts of anti-Jewish rhetoric. Limited to newspapers and speeches by those who believed that Jews had too much economic power and engaged in unethical business practices, these voices did little to hamper the ability of Jews to take advantage of their citizenship and opportunity.

In two decades after the creation of the United States Jews began to move westward to places like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Richmond, all nodes in the booming economic expansion as Americans moved off to new regions. Most of those Jews who went out to these new places and who created new kinds of institutions had been born in America. The outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in Europe in 1803, among other factors, kept down the number of immigrants in general who ventured across the Atlantic, Jews included. This all changed in 1820 when the floodgates opened, immigration took off, and a new chapter in American Jewish history began.

Selected Bibliography

Faber, Eli. A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820. The Jewish People in America, Volume 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Goodfriend, Joyce D. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hagy, James William. This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

Pencak, William. Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Hasia R. Diner is professor emerita in the Department of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. She is the director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History and the author of many books, including Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World (Yale University Press, 2017), Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015), We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (New York University Press, 2009), and The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (University of California Press, 2004).

[1] George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790. Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135.

[2] Peter Stuyvesant to the Amsterdam Chamber of Directors, September 22, 1654.