A Promised Land

American religious freedom was defined and forged in part by Jewish faith leaders and communities during the Revolutionary era. In his most recent book, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom, historian Adam Jortner traces how Jewish presence helped shape American independence and the decision to extend citizenship to all religions in the new nation. Jortner describes Philadelphia’s synagogue, Mikveh Israel, as a growing center that supported the Revolutionary cause

As a founder of Congregation Mikveh Israel and a business owner on Market Street, Jonas Phillips served in the Pennsylvania militia and advocated for equal rights for the Jewish community. On July 28, 1776, Phillips folded up one of his neighbor John Dunlap’s broadsides and enclosed it in a letter to Gumpel Samson, his relative and business associate in Amsterdam. He explained that he was sharing “a declaration of that whole country,” the newly created United States of America.  Unfortunately, a British ship captured his letter containing the news of independence. As part of The Declaration’s Journey, presented by Griffin Catalyst, the original contents of Phillips’ confiscated parcel — his letter, the Dunlap printing, and a bill of exchange intended for his mother — are all on loan from The National Archives of the United Kingdom, returning to Philadelphia for the first time since 1776.  

Excerpt

JONAS PHILLIPS USED YIDDISH, ALTHOUGH he could "write my meaning better in English." But it was July 1776, and Phillips was shipping a copy of the Declaration of Independence across the seas in violation of British law. So Phillips wrote in Hebrew script to get the Declaration into the hands of his kinsman in Amsterdam and sent the letter to the Netherlands by the roundabout way of the Caribbean. Phillips was bullish on the revolution; the enclosed documents were, he wrote, "a declaration of the whole country." The war would bankrupt England and free America. "The Americans have an army of 100,000 rookim," he wrote, using the Yiddish term for "tough guys." The letter never made it to Holland. The British seized it and wondered if it was written in some kind of code. 

The Jews of the American Revolution remain similarly cryptic to us. The subject sounds more like Borscht-Belt schtick than serious history. But Phillips had plenty of company. Patriot Jews were early and unstinting in their support for the revolution, in synagogues, on the streets, and in the army. In 1770, the Pennsylvania Jew Barnard Gratz wrote to a friend, "I was going to inclose you the king's speech to parlement," but it "was such narishkeit [foolishness) that [it] is not worth the postage.” At the Battle of Beaufort in South Carolina, one of the patriot militias was nicknamed "the Jew Company" because twenty-eight of its forty members were Jewish. A memoir of the Jew Company noted that they did not use that term; they called themselves "the Free Citizens." Solomon Bush of Philadelphia became a colonel during the war and suffered a leg wound in 1777 that, he regretted, would make him unable to revenge the rongs (sic] of my injured country" soon enough. In 1774, Mordecai Sheftall was one of the few Georgians to pledge his resistance to the Coercive Acts—- Britain's effort to suspend the Massachusetts government and blockade Boston harbor. A year later, as the rebellion spread, Sheftall became chairman of the Savannah Parochial Committee—an organization that acted as a de facto government in defiance of British rule. As an extra-legal entity, the committee did not have to follow Georgia law, and therefore Sheftall as a Jew did not have to take the Christian oath of office required for all Georgians who exercised political authority in the name of the king.  

On May 17, 1776, Gershom Seixas, head of Shearith Israel (New York's only synagogue), organized a day of fasting and prayer, as recommended by Congress. The proclamation from Congress had been specifically drafted for Christian clergy, so Seixas was under no obligation to do anything. But he led the Jews in worship anyway, asking God to " put it in the heart of our Sovereign Lord, George the third ... to turn away their fierce Wrath from North America." Seixas called on the "God of our Fathers Abraham Isaac and Jacob," but otherwise it was the patriot prayer suggested by the congressional proclamation. In essence, Seixas turned the synagogue into an extension of Congress-making the synagogue a patriot space. American Jews, Seixas wrote, should view themselves "as possessing equal rights & privileges, with the rest of the inhabitants." Seixas soon led the patriot Jews out of New York. As the British bore down on the city, Seixas gathered up the Torah and ritual objects and crossed the East River with his fellow patriot Jews, to live in exile in Connecticut rather than worship under tory rule. In 1780, Seixas brought his followers to Philadelphia, where he became the religious leader of the first national American Jewish community. The revolution had rabbis. 

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Whenever and wherever American Jews petitioned for full citizenship after the war, they received it. The lack of religious restrictions on citizenship was one of the most radical results of the revolution. The rhetoric of 1776 valued autonomy over confession. The state did not derive from the church, but from the people. The Declaration of Independence itself said as much: Governments derived "their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government." The Declaration and the patriot movement made the case that "the governed," not a church or a monarch, were qualified to rule. The Jews were among the governed, and they gave their consent, joining the fight against Britain.

Geography and the accidents of war gave Jewish patriots an unusual advantage. In 1776, American Jews largely lived in five cities: Charleston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, and Savannah.  By 1780, all of those cities except Philadelphia were occupied or had just been occupied by the British. Exiled Jewish patriots therefore had only one place to go to practice their faith free of tory rule. (Loyalist Jews stayed home.) By one reckoning, the number of Jews in Philadelphia tripled over the course of the war, with almost 1,000 living in America's largest city by 1783. "The disturbances in this Country, wrote two Philadelphia Jews, caused "numbers of our brethren from the different Congregations in America to come with their families to reside here." Philadelphia’s synagogue, Mikveh Israel, inherited a Jewish community from across the new nation. These were patriot Jews, unified in political ideology more than by common religious theology or practice.  

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Mikveh Israel replaced its old Philadelphia-based board with a new adjunta from across the country. The synagogue of patriot Jews was run by men from Georgia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and even New Orleans. Gershom Seixas acted as rabbi. Rebecca Phillips of Philadelphia and Grace Nathan of New York headed up fundraising for ritual objects. Jonas Phillips served as president. Phillips had become one of the rookim he had written about in 1776, serving in the Pennsylvania militia and helping to organize a series at blockade runners to get crucial supplies into the colonies. Phillips invited Pennsylvania's elected leaders to the dedication of the new building in September 1782, giving "sanction to their design, the adjunta wrote, “agreeable to the Sovereignty of the United States." The new building was dedicated with a prayer for George Washington and the United States, in both Hebrew and English.  

So the revolution changed American Judaism as well. For the first time in centuries, Jews in the pews did not need to consult the yeshiva to determine what counted as Jewish law and practice. They would vote on it instead. The Philadelphia model adopted by patriot Jews in Mikveh Israel spread across the country. New York, Charleston, Savannah, and Richmond all founded or refounded their synagogues in the 1780s and '90s. All of them were led by patriot Jews from Mikveh Israel; all of them wrote constitutions using Mikveh Israel's 1782 constitution as a model. One of the first (if not the first) self-conscious, national congregations of religious Americans from across the country were the Jews.