Historians are convinced that something pivotal occurred for or by Jews during the American Revolution, they just don’t agree what it was. A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, & the Birth of Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2024), by the Auburn historian Adam Jortner, is not a history of these histories, but in this fine new work on the role Jews played to establish religious freedom during the Revolutionary era, readers get a sense of what the author was up against.
The earliest hagiographers, like Howard Fast and Charles Spencer Hart, claimed that the Revolution spotlighted the outsized Jewish contribution to America’s founding. They waxed nostalgic about Haym Salomon, the Philadelphia Jew who single-handedly, it was argued, raised the needed funds to finance General Washington’s army’s trek over the Delaware River, his march through New Jersey, and his reconquest of British-occupied New York. The most visible manifestation of this legend is in Chicago’s Herald Square: a bronze monument depicting George Washington flanked by Robert Morris and Haym Salomon.
Soon, a generation of university-trained historians came along who were more secure about Jewish patriotism, and they set the record straight about Salomon and the thousand other Jews who lived in the United States during the final quarter of the eighteenth century. Most, it turned out, were Whigs, and some were Tories, and there was no need to embellish Salomon’s role beyond his modest contributions to the war effort.
Jacob Rader Marcus (1896-1995) wrote more than anyone about colonial Jews and the early republic. He dutifully qualified Salomon’s record and other romantic tales of Jews and the Revolution, written during the first half of the twentieth century, when Jews, amid rising antisemitism, needed reassurance they belonged in the U.S. Marcus’s focus was on American exceptionalism; he wanted to show that Jews fared better in colonial America than in Europe. To that end, Marcus held that the happenings surrounding July 4, 1776, marked the earliest moment that Jews received emancipation—i.e., rights as citizens—in any place during the modern period.
To be sure, Marcus recorded subsequent instances of anti-Jewish policies, like the opposition to the “Jew Bill,” which in 1826 permitted Jews to hold office in Maryland. But in all cases, Jews could turn to our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, various state constitutions—to argue their case.
Synagogue leaders held less power to enforce heavy rules, and regular people felt empowered to revolt, to create breakaway synagogues if the establishment no longer reflected their critical values.
Jonathan Sarna, a leading historian of American Jewry, has not exactly disagreed with Marcus, but his scholarly crosshairs have been aimed elsewhere. His interest, in line with historians like Gordon Wood and Nathan Hatch, was on how the values of the Revolution impacted daily life. In the wake of the Revolution, Jewish communities democratized their synagogue constitutions, turning to revolutionary rhetoric for self-description, writing lines like, “We, the members of the K.K. Shearith Israel (of New York),” and, at a congregation in Richmond, Va., “We, the subscribers of the Israelite religion.” It wasn’t just lip service. Moving forward, synagogue leaders held less power to enforce heavy rules, and regular people felt empowered to revolt, to create breakaway synagogues if the establishment no longer reflected their critical values.
Jortner’s new monograph accepts the arguments of Marcus and Sarna, but with some significant sympathies for the earlier writers who were quick to give credit to Jewish Revolutionaries. No, Jortner does not seek to reestablish the myth of Haym Salomon, nor does he lend much credence to a relatively recent attempt to establish Alexander Hamilton’s yichus, or Jewish lineage. Instead, in this expertly researched and laudably readable survey of Jews in the early republic, Jortner refocuses his historical lens on the role Jews played to guarantee religious freedoms for themselves and all non-Protestants in the United States.
How did Jews accomplish this? Jortner begins with some well-known cases of Jewish contributions to our evolving democratic character: Jonas Phillips’s appeal for tolerance to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, for example, and the Newport Jews’ letter in 1790 to George Washington—the “classic defense of American religious freedom,” Jortner plausibly claims.
But much in this book is new. For example, Jortner’s fifth chapter, on the “Synagogue of the Revolution,” is a creative reinterpretation of this period that places Philadelphia at the center of the historical discussion. Jews exiled from New York, and from other areas occupied by British troops, made their way to Philadelphia. Before then, Philadelphia’s Jews had struggled to cobble together a synagogue community. They rented modest spaces, cycled through religious functionaries, and couldn’t find consensus about various customs and European folkways. But with the influx of Jews from Baltimore, Charleston, New York, and Savannah, Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel emerged as the headquarters of a “national” Jewish community.
Together, these women and men made public pronouncements and modeled new pluralistic behaviors with their non-Jewish neighbors. Jortner mined the congregation’s records and rabbinic sermons to cogently make his case for the centrality of Philadelphia. Jortner’s argument centers on a date. On March 24, 1782, the Philadelphia congregation reconstituted its bylaws and established a new building of its own. Several of Mikveh Israel’s Philadelphia-based board members stepped down to make room for Jewish representatives from different states. This broadminded group democratized its process for decision-making, inspired by the earlier work of the Continental Congress at the nearby Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall).
How important was this moment? Perhaps with a touch of overstatement, Jortner declares that “American Judaism began that day.” After the war, Philadelphia shrank back to a more regular size; exiled Jews returned to their communities and established new congregations in places such as Richmond, or reorganized existing ones to reflect the new democratic values they had experimented with at Mikveh Israel. Gershom Mendes Seixas, who had feverishly petitioned Pennsylvania for Jewish rights during the Revolution, returned to his clerical post in New York, but only after Shearith Israel’s lay leaders promised him they would conform to the new religious sensibilities Seixas had incubated in Philadelphia.
Critics might justifiably charge Jortner with too much optimism. After all, the Revolution did not cure America of religious intolerance. Yet, it is true that the era of independence provided a framework to engage these important issues and, although still imperfectly, work to solve them. Jews’ roles in making this happen is the central lesson of Jortner’s important—and, one has to say, timely—book.