Part Five: Jews in America

In the United States, Jewish communities began to organize themselves the early 1800s. A Jewish orphanage was set up in Charlestown, South Carolina in 1801, the first Jewish school, Polonies Talmud Torah, was established in New York in 1806.

This is in sharp contrast to other areas in the ‘New World’ where the Jewish presence was felt in the 1500s, (although clandestine in many areas) and overtly by the 1600s.  Synagogues existed in Brasil, Curacao, Jamaica, as well as yeshiva’s. 

It was not until 1843, the first national secular Jewish organization in the United States, the B’nai B’rith was established.

In the Spanish part of America, that is Texas, Jews were present from the first explorers.

Jao de la Porta was with Jean Laffite at Galveston, Texas in 1816, Maurice Henry was in Velasco in the late 1820s. Jews fought in the armies of the Texas Revolution of 1836, some with Fannin at Goliad, others at San Jacinto.

By 1840, Jews constituted a tiny, but nonetheless stable, middle-class minority of about 15,000 out of the 17 million Americans counted by the U.S. Census.

As immigration increased the Jewish population to 50,000 by 1848, negative stereotypes of Jews in newspapers, literature, drama, art, and popular culture grew more commonplace and physical attacks became more frequent.

This kind of anto-semitism did not exist in the rest of the New World, be it Brasil or Barbados, Argentina or Antiqua.  Despite the fact America touted itself as ‘home of the free’ and waved its Bill of Rights in the faces of colonies and overseas departments, Jews were far freer in Jamaica then they were in New York City.

Jewish immigration at this time was primarily of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, contra the previous immigrants who were mainly Sephardic.

However, it was in the United States that two of the major branches of Judaism were established by these German immigrants: Reform Judaism (out of German Reform Judaism) and Conservative Judaism, in reaction to the perceived liberalness of Reform Judaism.

Jews participated in American life. They fought on both side during the Civil War. Approximately 3,000 Jews (out of around 150,000 Jews in the United States by 1860) fought on the Confederate side and 7,000 fought on the Union side.

Jews also played leadership roles on both sides, with nine Jewish generals and 21 Jewish colonels participating in the War. Judah P. Benjamin, a non-observant Jew, served as Secretary of State and acting Secretary of War of the Confederacy.

By the time of the Civil War, tensions over race and immigration, as well as economic competition between Jews and non-Jews, combined to produce the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism in America to that date.

Americans on both sides of the slavery issue denounced Jews as disloyal war profiteers, and accused them of driving Christians out of business and of aiding and abetting the enemy.

Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No.  11 expelling Jews from areas under his control in western Tennessee:

    The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

This order was rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln but not until it had been enforced in a number of towns.

Grant later issued an order “that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the road southward.” His aide, Colonel John V. DuBois, ordered “all cotton speculators, Jews, and all vagabonds with no honest means of support”, to leave the district. “The Israelites especially should be kept out as they are such an intolerable nuisance.”

So was the attitude of the North in relation to Jews in the 1860s.