Sarna, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004), 120-121. After Jewish expulsions in northern Mississippi and Paducah, Kentucky, President Lincoln learned of Grant’s order and put a stop to it, condemning the wronging of an entire group for the behavior of only “a few sinners.” 7 Jonathan D. Grant even issued an order to expel all Jews from the territory under his command, blaming Jews “as a class” for the smuggling and cotton speculation conducted by a diverse network of people in his region. Newspaper cartoons depicted Jews as unpatriotic merchants who sold military supplies at artificially high prices, undermining the war effort while making a profit. Grant expelled Jews from his war zone in 1862.ĭuring the Civil War, for example, anti-Jewish intolerance increased dramatically on both sides, with both the Union and Confederacy making baseless accusations that Jews aided the opposing side. Sarna, Jonathan, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (2012), Schocken Books Under General Orders No. 5 Jon Efron, The Jews: A History (Pearson, 2009),226. And by the time of the Revolutionary War, five small Jewish communities existed on the Atlantic seaboard. In 1740, naturalization laws included Protestant and Jewish residents, offering Jews a legal status they would not find in Europe for another 50 years. Sarna, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004), 11-12. When this first Jewish American community petitioned in 1685 for the right to worship in public, they were refused by the Common Council, which stated that this right belonged only to those who professed “faith in Christ.” But by the 18th century, synagogues were tolerated.
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Though the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant attempted to have these Jews removed, the Dutch West India Company enforced tolerance, prioritizing the perceived economic benefits of Jewish mercantile networks for the growing colony.
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Sarna, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004), 1. The first known Jews to make a permanent home in America came to the Dutch Colony of New Amsterdam (present-day New York) in 1654 - a group of 23 mostly Sephardi refugees from Recife, Brazil, which expelled its Jews that year, following Portuguese conquest. The history of Jews in America is a history of the ongoing negotiation between hard-won legal freedoms and the lingering social effects of racial and religious prejudice as it persists and reignites in this country. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006), 1-7. American antisemitism did not emerge in a vacuum, but within an imposed racial hegemony that enslaved, subjugated and discriminated against Black Americans and other minorities.
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Individual states, however, maintained the right to impose limitations on the rights of religious minorities, and some did so for decades against Jews, Catholics, atheists and, later, Mormons and Muslims. Bill of Rights was approved in 1791, and its First Amendment prohibited government from impeding freedom of religion or making any law respecting the establishment of religion. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A.
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President Washington even expressed warm welcome to American Jews in a letter to the Hebrew Congregations of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790, promising that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” 1 Howard M. Article IV of the United States Constitution promised that religious tests were not to be used in elections to any American office or public trust. From the early days of independence, America’s founders imagined the United States as a land of religious tolerance.