The Jews of 1776
29 Sivan 5784 (5 July 2024)
On August 1st, 1776, a wealthy Sephardic landowner from South Carolina named Francis Salvador became the first Jew to perish in the American Revolution. Like many colonial settlers to face off with native tribes, he met a gruesome death. Mortally wounded in battle, he was captured by the Cherokee and scalped alive before finally succumbing to his wounds.
Salvador was not just a soldier, he was also a politician, having twice been elected to the Provincial Congress of South Carolina in 1775, just two years after arriving in the colony. British colonial law at the time prohibited non-Christians from holding public office, but the people of South Carolina didn’t see a problem with it. Given he represented the town of Ninety Six, which colonists at the time commonly called “Jews Land” on account of its relatively high Jewish population, it seemed like a natural fit. As far as can be gleaned from Patriot publications, Salvador was held in high esteem by his contemporaries.
Nor was Salvador the only Jew to hold office at the time. Mordecai Sheftall, an Ashkenazi Jew from Georgia, held various official roles during the American Revolution in both military and civilian offices. Unlike Salvador, for whom there is little evidence to suggest his Jewish identity extended much beyond his ethnic background, Sheftall was an Orthodox Jew and a leader in the local Jewish community, having successfully petitioned King George III to permit a Jewish cemetery in Savannah a decade before the Revolutionary War began.
Much like Salvador, Sheftall (along with one of his sons) was also captured during the war, albeit he had the good fortune of being captured by the British rather than one of their tribal allies. And while the British were not nearly as sadistic in their treatment of captives, they did make a point of trying to humiliate Jewish prisoners of war, regularly dousing their cutlery in pork fat before forcing them to eat with it. Sheftall and his son managed to escape from captivity and returned to America, settling in Philadelphia since the Red Coats seized and burned his property during their occupation of Savannah. From there the family got involved in privateering, which brought them a great deal of success in both reaccumulating personal wealth while harming the British navy.
Salvador and Sheftall may have been unique in terms of their stature within colonial society, they were by no means unique among Southern Jews in their attitudes. The Jews of the Southern Colonies overwhelmingly supported the American Revolution, a fact which the British took note of. Sir James Wright, the British military governor of occupied Georgia suggested to King George III that he expel all the Jews from the 13 Colonies upon the war’s conclusion. In 1780, during their occupation of Georgia, the British passed the Disqualification Act to imprison and seize the property of prominent Patriots in the colony. Six Jews made the list of 166 names, nearly 4%, about ten times their proportion of the Georgian population. Of the most important figures in Savannah’s small Jewish community at the time, only Abigail Minis, an 80-year-old bubbie, avoided being blacklisted by the British. She was a Patriot who, even in her elderly years, would sneak food to prisoners of the British, but was able to avoid the British’s wrath through her various Loyalist connections. Her son Philip, however, made the list.
While the Jews of the South overwhelmingly supported the Revolutionary cause, the issue was considerably more controversial among Northern Jews. While the Southern colonies were founded on enlightenment principles, with John Locke himself having written the constitution of the colony of South Carolina, the Northern colonies were largely founded by religious zealots, seeking the freedom to set up what were effectively theocracies. Most of the colonies not only had a state religion in Christianity, but endowed specific sects of Christianity with the unbridled right to rule the colonies, a situation which continued in many of the Northern states for decades after the Revolution concluded. Antisemitism, both social and institutional, was widespread throughout the North, with Connecticut, for example, prohibiting the construction of synagogues in the state well into the 1820s.
Given modern “intersectional” understandings of bigotry, the fact that the North was considerably more hostile towards Jews than the South in early America can be hard to imagine, but it’s important to put this into context. Northern abolitionists campaigning against slavery were very often motivated by religion, even if they didn’t particularly care for African-Americans and otherwise would rather just ship them to Africa. The same religious zeal which motivated their righteous crusade against slavery also justified hostile attitudes toward other religious beliefs, particularly Catholicism and Judaism.
It was within this context that Jews had to make a choice. While the Revolutionaries were certainly in part inspired by enlightenment principles, among them religious freedom, nobody truly knew what a post-Revolutionary America would look like. The Articles of Confederation, the United States’ first constitution written a year into the Revolutionary War, placed very little authority in the hands of the federal government, leaving the individual states the right to largely do as they please. It wouldn’t have been insane for a New England Jew to believe that the departure of the British could leave them at the mercy of religious fundamentalists electrified by revolutionary zeal.
There was also a demographic component to this divide. While Jews in the South were overwhelmingly Sephardim who arrived in the New World due to persecution in Spain and Portugal, Northern Jewry had a considerably larger Ashkenazi component who largely came to the New World for economic reasons. These Jews, many of whom had deep economic ties to Britain and Continental Europe, had reasonable concern that American independence would cut them off economically from the other side of the Atlantic. Southern Jews did not share this problem, and likely saw the Old World as a cesspool of antisemitism that they were more than happy to cut ties with.
In Newport, Rhode Island, the local Jewish community largely sided with the British, likely owing to the fact that the Revolutionaries attempted to force the Jews to sign a loyalty oath to the colonies which would force them to acknowledge Christianity as the one true religion. Isaac Touro, the leader of the local community, was a Loyalist throughout the war and allowed the British to use the Newport synagogue as a war hospital. When Patriots retook Newport, Touro fled to Jamaica where he died in 1783. His family, who were beholden to their patriarch despite their Patriot sympathies, returned to the United States in the aftermath of the war and settled in Boston with Touro’s brother-in-law Moses Hays, a Patriot and close friend of the legendary Paul Revere.
Despite split attitudes among Northern Jews, who made up a minority of the Jews in Revolutionary America, it was Philadelphia’s Haym Salomon who proved to be the most important and, later, the most famous Jew of the American Revolution. Dubbed the “financier of the American Revolution,” General George Washington personally called out for his aid when he realized he did not have enough funds to wage battle at Yorktown. Salomon’s wealth never recovered from his financing of the revolution, but his important work covering the costs of the Battle of Yorktown brought the final blow to the British army before they finally surrendered their American colonies to the Continental Congress. I won’t go too deeply into his story as it is well-represented in the historical record.
In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, American leaders acknowledged the important role the young country’s miniscule Jewish population played in the war. As president, George Washington sent a famous letter to the Jews of Newport thanking them for their support for the Patriot cause, although it’s unclear whether Washington was aware that most of Newport’s Jews would’ve had Loyalist sympathies. The United States would offer “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” in respect to the Jews, he declared, asking “only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” He also used the opportunity to take a jab at ongoing European debates surrounding Jewish emancipation, declaring “no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Washington did not speak much of the Jews during his lifetime, likely since he knew very few, but the statement reflects a keen awareness of antisemitism in Europe and the language with which they discussed the topic. Less well known is that Washington granted an interview to bubbie Abigail’s daughter Leah during his presidency, although the content of the interview has been lost to time.
An American founder who took much more interest in the Jewish people was Thomas Jefferson, who fought to explicitly grant Jews religious freedom in the state of Virginia. He championed the idea that religious freedom was the antidote to religious bigotry in a letter to Jacob De La Motta, a Sephardic Jewish physician from Charleston who served as an army surgeon during the War of 1812, further declaring that he hopes America’s Jews see themselves represented in government. He was critical of the Jewish religion, as he was of other religions, but never believed that religious faith should be a barrier to any aspect of society.
Inspired by the principles of religious freedom promoted by the founders, early American states progressively removed or ignored their restrictions on Jewish public participation inherited from their British predecessors. In North Carolina, which constitutionally prohibited all non-Protestants from holding public office, a Jew named Jacob Henry was elected twice to the state legislature in 1808 and 1809. During his second term in office, questions were raised about whether he should be allowed to continue serving on account of his Jewish faith, but the legislature voted unanimously, including the legislator who raised the issue in the first place, to allow him to remain in office after an extremely brief inquisition led them to the conclusion that behaving like Spanish Catholic theocrats was unbecoming of an enlightened people. Other states followed suit, with Maryland passing the ‘Jew Bill’ in 1826, formally abolishing all restrictions on Jews holding public office. By 1840, institutional discrimination against Jews was entirely limited to New England, and these restrictions were all removed in the aftermath of the Civil War, partly due to haranging by Southern Democrats who enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy of Northerners pushing civil rights in the South while discriminating against religious minorities in their own states. The matter even became a talking point in the 1868 election, with Democrats pointing to Republican candidate Ullyses Grant’s expulsion order targeting Jews in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Grant, eternally apologetic, went on to appoint more Jews to public office than all of his predecessors combined, including the first Jewish governor of a territory, and promoted Jewish emancipation in his foreign policy.
It’s easy to blame the founding generation, the generation of 1776, for turning a blind eye to discrimination against their Jewish neighbors in a country founded at least in part on religious freedom and the inalienable rights of man. But I think it’s more important to look at 1776 as the beginning of a revolutionary process that didn’t truly end until the Civil War, whereby Americans slowly but progressively tore apart lingering political traditions they inherited from the British and replaced them with their own enlightened principles. Not all the Jews of 1776 enjoyed equal rights in the aftermath of the American Revolution, but they did play a role in creating the first emancipatory constitution in the world and, while not everyone who fought in the Revolutionary War expected the freedoms granted by their new nation to extend to Jews, the logic of their revolution would inevitably lead to it. Under these circumstances, it should come as no surprise that the American people are the best friends the Jewish people have today.
- Beau Chasse
Very interesting study. Thanks for sharing.