Exiles by the Streams of Babylon: Newport Jews in the Colonial Era

Newport, Rhode Island, wears its colonial past like a badge of honor. Visitors to its historic district encounter numerous plaques, markers, and monuments as they wend the town’s narrow and cobblestoned streets. As contemporary tourists experience it, Newport’s historic landscape symbolizes three resonant, interconnected, and sometimes incommensurate American ideals: freedom of religion, unfettered capitalism, and patriotism. The city’s founding in 1639 as a haven for religious practitioners who couldn’t abide the strict Puritanism of Massachusetts Bay prevented any religious building from being situated in close proximity to courthouses, seats of government, or public commons. For all of the spiritual fervor that motivated those early settlers, however, it was the harbor that shaped Newport’s destiny and determined the layout of its townscape. During its mid-eighteenth economic heyday, the city’s merchants were full-fledged participants in the famed “Triangle Trade,” which exchanged manufactured goods from northwestern Europe for enslaved people from West Africa, and then sent those enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and British North America, where their labor resulted in the production of rum to be shipped to Europe. As for patriotism, the city proudly proclaims its history as the target of a devastating British invasion that began in 1778 and calls still greater attention to the fact that one of the most famous documents that George Washington ever produced, the “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island,” was addressed to its Jewish community. Present-day Newport highlights its colonial history in order to celebrate the seemingly simple gift of American pluralism, but the experience of the town’s Jews was hardly indicative of peace, harmony, or ease at any level.

Cultural diversity is a complex inheritance. When tourists encounter the physical vestiges of Newport’s colonial-era Jewish population—including the Touro Synagogue, which is the oldest synagogue building in the United States—they are coming into contact with one of early America’s most noteworthy but also paradoxical principles. Heterogeneity, religious and otherwise, could be conducive to greater prosperity, but only for those members of society whose economic power, social networks, and racial origins enabled them to adapt to and even take advantage of changing conditions. As for the landmarks themselves, because they invite visitors to imagine a distant past through the lens of present-day ideologies and urgencies, they often fail to yield historically reliable insights. Newport’s wealth of beautifully appointed antiquated buildings and landscapes, like those of any other city whose livelihood depends on attracting the interest and attention of tourists, sometimes projects a past that was too good to have been true. The story of the city’s colonial-era Jewish population reifies this principle.

For instance, while it is tempting to assume that the Jews who first came to Newport in the seventeenth century went there as a direct result of Rhode Island’s status as a haven for persecuted religious groups, no documentation exists to corroborate such a view. Owing to a paucity of evidence, historians have yet to achieve a consensus on the subject of when the Jews first arrived there: 1658 is one of the dates that scholars have pointed to, but the primary basis for that claim is a nineteenth-century transcription of a single (and somewhat dubious) document. A more reliable date is 1677, when town records indicate that a handful of Jews purchased a plot of land for a cemetery. One of these Jews owned a trading sloop and another, Abraham Campanal, sought and received permission to sell liquor but was also hauled into court for “fornication.” Court records tell us that a few successfully resisted an attempt to oust them on the basis of their “foreign” origins in the early 1680s, but that result doesn’t mean that they had been welcomed with open arms. We will never know whether Newport’s earliest Jews were huddled masses yearning to breathe free or entrepreneurial operators yearning for, but not quite getting, a big break.

If nothing else, the extant burials in Newport’s Jewish cemetery help to complete the picture of what life was like for the Jews who followed in the footsteps of those first arrivals and went there during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Like other natural disasters that cause physical displacement and social re-ordering, the upheavals that occurred after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 seem to have instigated this second “wave” of arrivals. Among the few dozen Jewish men and women who settled in Newport starting in the 1750s and were eventually buried in its Jewish cemetery were a handful of “New Christians” (that is, Jews who had converted to Catholicism in the aftermath of the Inquisition) of Sephardic origin whose decision to break with the Old World seems to have been motivated by a combination of mercantile opportunity and religious aspiration. Once in Newport they got down to business and also eagerly re-embraced Judaism.

In the relative safety of British North America Duarte Lopez and his wife Anna changed their names to Aaron and Abigail (Abigail died in 1762, after which Lopez married Sarah Rivera, the daughter of one of his business associates). Shortly after arriving in Newport, Aaron underwent an adult circumcision. His business stature rose with the passage of time, and his ventures included the processing and sale of spermaceti, the manufacture of chocolate, and—eventually—the operation of a retail store. Aaron Lopez was an exemplar of business versatility, and over the years his operations were inclusive of, though hardly dominated by, involvement in the slave trade. He gained notoriety as a result of his financial successes and respect as a consequence of his willingness to meet the social standards of the city’s elites. His generous monetary contributions played a significant role in the Newport Jews’ effort to create the synagogue that eventually came to be known by the name “Touro,” but, when it was founded in 1763, housed Congregation Yeshuat (Remnant of) Israel.

As dedicated as he was to Newport, Aaron Lopez was never able to surmount the challenge of gaining citizenship rights there. In 1762, after two failed attempts to convince Rhode Island authorities to grant him that legal stature, he moved to Massachusetts temporarily in order to acquire the status that his own supposedly tolerant colony was unwilling to confer upon him. Ironically, the purportedly Puritanical authorities of the Bay State were more amenable to permitting what Rhode Island had refused. Naturalization rights in hand, Lopez eventually returned to Newport, where he remained until the British invaded the city in the late 1770s. He died in 1782 when his wagon overturned in a pond. When he was laid to rest in Newport’s Jewish cemetery, his great champion, the Congregationalist minister and president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, described Newport’s “Merchant Prince” as an “Amiable, benevolent, most hospitable & very respectable gentleman . . . without a single Enemy & and the most universally beloved by an extensive Acquaintance of any man I ever knew.”[1]

Lopez’s legacy is complex, to say the least. He was a committed Jew who had taken considerable risks to assert and retain his faith when it had been dangerous to do so. He was a powerful merchant who had not hesitated to build a financial empire which, like the empires of his gentile counterparts, depended at least in part on slavery and the slave trade. On the question of American independence, he was initially a fence-sitter who, as the Revolutionary War progressed, and perhaps as a result of personal loyalties, ultimately chose to support the patriot cause.

Newport’s Jews were hardly unanimous on that front, however, and the story of their divided loyalties is borne out by the facts that were attendant upon one of the cemetery’s more noteworthy burial markers. For that matter, the (re-)naming of the synagogue offers further testimony to the same complicated outcome. Yeshuat Israel was renamed the Touro Synagogue in the early 1800s in memory of its first lay leader, Isaac Touro, and in homage to his illustrious son Judah, whose philanthropy had made the building’s preservation possible. Isaac and Reyna Touro, who died, respectively, in 1783 and 1787, were memorialized in the Jewish cemetery by their second son, Abraham, in 1814. The monument to their memory condenses nearly the entire history of the Newport Jews during the Revolutionary War. Isaac’s stone refers to him as the “Reader and faithful pastor of Congregation Yeshuat Israel” and explains that he died (and was also buried) in Jamaica. For her part, his wife Reyna—“The worthy relict of Revd Isaac Touro”—died in Boston, but her actual remains lie under her stone.

How had it come to pass that these two people, both of whom had found a home and Jewish community in Newport, died so far outside the city? The answer is that the pressures of the Revolutionary War had driven them out. For his part, the Dutch-born Isaac Touro had been a dedicated Tory. When the British occupied Newport he stayed put, but the eventual triumph of the American cause necessitated his flight to the British-held island of Jamaica. Reyna had a shorter distance to travel to the safety of her brother Moses Michael Hays’s house in Boston. Hays, who had left New York for Newport and had lived there for nearly a decade, had been true to the American cause throughout the war, but this had not stopped Rhode Island authorities from questioning his patriotism and demanding multiple and redundant loyalty oaths from him. When he moved to Boston during the middle of the war, Moses Michael Hays became that city’s first permanent Jewish settler and a respected banker as well as insurance broker. His greatest claim to fame in Boston was his leadership in the Masonic movement, whose latter-day adherents memorialize him to this day. Newport had been too small and fleeting a locale for such an ambitious personage to make his way. For that matter, within two decades, virtually all of Newport’s Jews had left the city for other locations, both within and beyond North America. The city’s most famous Jewish landmark, its synagogue, wouldn’t see regular services again until the 1880s. Its second most famous Jewish landmark, the cemetery, would be immortalized by the works of two famous nineteenth-century poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emma Lazarus, both of whom drew attention to how antiquated and alien it appeared to be—a shrine to a community that had all but ceased to exist by 1800.

George Washington immortalized Newport’s Jewish community in 1790 by praising its members in the letter that has since become enshrined as a point of origin for the separation of church and state in the United States. In words that continue to stir us, he assured them that they deserved to feel at home in Newport and in the nation that had just been won from Britain: “The Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”[2] How ought we to feel, knowing that by the time he wrote it, the community whose members he was addressing had already passed into the realm of memory?

Michael Hoberman is a professor of English studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts and the author of several books on early Jewish American history, including New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011) and A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History (Rutgers University Press, 2018). His essays on Jewish history in the US can be found in Tablet Magazine. In 2026, his new book, Imagining Early American Jews, will be published by Oxford University Press.

[1] Ezra Stiles, diary entry, June 8, 1782, in The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., President of Yale College, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 3:24.

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