This Log Cabin Led to the “Great Awakening”—Which Led to the American Revolution

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we’d love to tell stories about America’s founding. We also love to tell stories about America’s faith heritage, and this next story combines both. Here to tell the story about Jews in America around the time of the Revolution is Adam Jortner. He’s a professor of history and religion at Auburn University. His book, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, The American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom. Professor Jortner, what brought you to study this idea of Jews in the Revolution? I’m a real history buff. I had no idea, no clue that Jews had been a part of the fighting of the war effort.

00:01:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds fake. It sounds like a comedy routine. I’ll tell you about Jews and the Revolution. That’s the shocking thing to me. And the more I read about it, the more there was to find about it.

00:01:15
Speaker 3: Talk about how you came to write about this subject.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: I wrote a book about Mormons; I’ve written a book about Native American prophets. And my wife was pregnant with my second kid, I was very nervous, and I was like, “Well, I need a small project. I’ll work on Jews and the Revolution,” because that won’t that won’t take very long. My second son’s now ten years old, so it did take a while. But what I found out was: not only are there Jews in the United States during the Revolution, they’re really passionate patriots. For the most part, a lot of Jews rush to sign up, and a lot of them end up—because of the way the Revolutionary War works out—a lot of them end up in the same city. They’re all in Philadelphia, and they form this synagogue. They re-form the local synagogue Mikvah Israel in Philadelphia in the seventeen-eighties, which makes them one of the very first kind of national religious groups. So not only are there, you know, Jews in the Revolution, not only are Jews part of the American religious history, they’re there from the very beginning of the Republic. And that really made me stop and say, “I need to know about these guys. I need to really think about religion and the Revolution, just just to get the basic question of, well, what were people doing? What did they believe? What kind of beliefs are bouncing around there in Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and all these places?”

00:02:46
Speaker 1: You said they came to Philadelphia. Where did the Jews come from? And when were the first Jews here in America? When did the Jews arrive and why did they arrive? Did they arrive for the same reason the Puritans arrived?

00:03:01
Speaker 2: They all end up in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War because most of the cities they’re living in—Savannah, Charleston, New York—by seventeen eighty, those have all been taken over by the British. So Philadelphia is sort of the last city standing that still has a functioning synagogue. If you want to be patriotic and you’re a Jew, if you can get to Philadelphia, you’ve got to get there. And this is something, you know, in terms of studying Jews. Judaism requires, there’s stuff you need for Judaism. You need to have a Torah, you need to have a minyan, and these things are things that a Methodist or an Episcopalian doesn’t necessarily need. So a lot of Jews end up in Philadelphia. But Jews have been in the Americas ever since Europeans got here. There were Jews coming over when Spain invaded with the Aztecs. Of course, Judaism is banned in Spain, so a number of Jews are hiding out in New Mexico in the fifteen-hundreds. So this is a very old tradition. In North America, Jews end up in the British colonies, places like New York and Georgia, mostly as a result of accidents. A lot of some of those Jews were living in Brazil when it was under Dutch control, and the Dutch offered some kind of religious freedom. Then Portugal takes over, so a bunch of Brazilian Jews end up heading to New York City. And there are other cases where various Jews from Britain or Jews who have been hiding in Spain sort of end up in British North America. They know British North America is a better place for religious freedom than Spain under the Spanish monarchy, but it’s still not a place where religious freedom is full and celebrated. There are still state churches in the British colonies. If you’re Jewish, you’re not a subject, you’re a resident, and the rules are different for residents. So, I mean, I think most of the Jews end up… I mean, there aren’t a ton of them. There may be something like one-tenth of one percent of the population, a tiny, tiny number, but they have built several synagogues by the time the Revolutionary War is underway. And people who are visitors to the colonies are sort of shocked that, you know, there’s no political equality, but they are shocked that there are Jews in the taverns along with everybody else. They’re surprised that in the day-to-day life they don’t see the kinds of distinctions between Christians and Jews that you might find in, say, Central Europe or Poland. There isn’t that kind of distinction that’s made.

00:05:53
Speaker 1: And it’s not just the Jews who are sort of residents but not citizens. You write a bit about the Catholics and the Baptists. Talk about that as well, because it’s a sort of an alliance little form as the Revolution occurs, where a war ultimately brings a lot of these folks together seeking a common ideal, which would be religious freedom. But that wasn’t also why they fought either. Talk about both of those things.

00:06:17
Speaker 2: The thing that I think I found out writing this book is that religious freedom was not a given in seventeen seventy-six; it wasn’t that the British colonies were this place where everybody had religious freedom, and then the Revolution just kind of codifies it. Religious freedom is something you have to work for; it’s something you have to build.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Professor Adam Jortner, and he’s a professor of history and religion at Auburn University, and his book A Promised Land is a must-read. I urge you to go to Amazon or the usual suspects, pick up the book, and you’ll learn a lot about the founding of this nation and the role Jews played in it. And my goodness, we’re learning something already: the fact that there were Jews in America at the time, that Jews were in in this patriotic struggle, and that so many Jews ended up in the city of Philadelphia because it was the one place where, as the war was beginning to commence, they felt free and they felt secure to represent and fight on behalf of and for their country, and more importantly, for religious freedom.

00:07:19
Speaker 3: When we come back, we’re…

00:07:20
Speaker 1: going to learn more about the state of religious freedom in the United States, and so much more when we continue with Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to ouramericanstories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s ouramericanstories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of the Jews around the American Revolution and how Jews played a part in our nation’s founding. And the Jews had been here, well, for a very long time. Before picking up where we last left off, is Adam Jortner. He’s a professor of history and religion at Auburn University.

00:08:33
Speaker 2: So what you have in the British colonies, and of course these are not equal places. We know slavery is legal in every British colony, even Massachusetts has enslaved people. And it’s not a world where it’s assumed that each human being has natural rights, and therefore, it’s not a big problem to say, “Well, there’s going to be a state church.” The church sort of varies place to place: Congregationalist-Puritan in Connecticut, and Episcopalian in Virginia, and so on. But these are all connected to the Empire. All these state churches go back to the center of power in London, and when the church is supported by a state, then the church will back up what the state wants. Other smarter people than me have pointed this out. When do we get real abolitionist churches in the United States? It’s after the state churches have gone away. So the state churches want stability, they want peace, and they want the social order. That’s how it works. So if you are not a member of the state church, depending on the colony, you just don’t have the same religious rights. This is the case with Jews, with Catholics, Baptists; that’s a bit of a surprise for many of my students down here in Alabama. But Baptists in Virginia are technically not allowed to preach without permission from the episcopalia in the Anglican state church. Now, what is that? My students always wanted to know: What does that mean? Does that mean they go around hunting up the Baptists? Well, no. The way it works is like this: If you’re a Baptist preacher or you attend Baptist services, you’ve got to pay taxes, and you pay a tax to support the state church. And then unless you want your preacher to go hungry, and if you want a meetinghouse to meet in, you’ve got to also pay for your own church. So you’re paying for two churches, only one of which you use. Second thing is, everybody’s got a—if you’re a Baptist preacher, you’ve got to be licensed and known by the state. And of course the state can come in any time it wants and says, “This is not official church, state church business.” And of course, when would the officials do this? They do it if any Baptists become troublesome, particularly if a Baptist starts preaching against enslavement, or if a Baptist starts preaching about freedom of conscience—that is, the right to choose your own pastor—then the next Sunday, you can be sure the sheriff might show up and say, “Oh, this is not a legal meeting,” or someone might, as sometimes happened, throw a beehive into your services, and then nobody investigates it, or your preacher might get arrested. This happens a couple of times when the preachers are arrested. So Baptists don’t have that kind of… When we talk about them not having full freedom, we really do mean: and they’re not rounded up, but they’re not allowed to worship. And for the powers that be, that’s okay, because they’re not worshiping the right way. Same thing happens with Jews in Rhode Island. There’s a Jewish community in the town of Newport, Rhode Island, and again they are allowed to be there, they’re residents, but there’s a couple of times when the governor comes in and tries to seize all Jewish property based on the idea that, “Well, this is a Christian kingdom.” That means Jews don’t have property rights. And they work it out, but that had to be pre scary. And when one Jew in Rhode Island, by the name of Aaron Lopez, he’s trying to become a subject. He wants to become an Englishman in the colonies. Rhode Island won’t let him, so, you know, it’s the same situation. And this is true: Catholics in Maryland. Catholics could practice, but not outside and not in it. You had to be in a private house if you wanted to worship and you were Catholic. You dared to be Catholic in Maryland. This is the situation at the beginning of the Revolution. And here is something I sort of realized, which is: What do the revolutionaries do before they write the Declaration of Independence, before they write the Constitution, before before even before they fire a shot? What they are saying seventeen seventy-four, seventy seventy-five is that the British government is no longer valid here. They have violated our rights, and we break from them. And once the Patriots say that, then all of those rules about which church you go to don’t apply to the Patriots.

00:13:04
Speaker 1: You know.

00:13:04
Speaker 2: Again, we can argue about this—what are the legal details—but the reality is, if you were Jewish and you wanted to be a patriot and sign up, you can. And Mordecai Sheftall in Georgia becomes leader of kind of the de facto government of Savannah, even though he’s Jewish, because it’s not under British control anymore. The same thing happens with a guy named Charles Carroll in Maryland who becomes a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He couldn’t hold office in Maryland because he’s Catholic, but the Patriots don’t have those rules. Come one, come all. And this is sort of how the Patriots… They have a lot of support from these minority religious groups, and support from all kinds of different people, but this is sort of how these minority groups who had been legally banned from full participation in the Patriot movement, they’re in.

00:13:57
Speaker 1: How did the Revolution change Jewish?

00:14:00
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, it gave Jews freedom to form their own synagogues. In most European and colonial places, and in Europe itself, there’s one synagogue per town. But that’s not going to fly with the First Amendment because you have freedom of religion, and what you get is actually multiplying synagogues. So that really, for the first time in the history of European Jewry and American Jewry, you have more than one synagogue to choose from, which is not always great because there aren’t that many Jews in a lot of these towns, but it’s a real expression of freedom, which is to say, we’re going to choose to worship this way and be Jews, and y’all can choose to worship a different way and be Jews, and the state and the rabbis cannot come in and stop them. So it leads to a proliferation of voices about Judaism. The other thing that is very interesting is that it…

00:14:57
Speaker 4: leads to the first Jewish critiques of Christianity in hundreds and hundreds of years, because freedom of the press meant that Jews could finally write about that.

00:15:11
Speaker 2: And of course there are Christian groups who say, “This is great.” This religious freedom allows us to preach to Jews, because in Europe it’s hard to preach the Gospel to Jews because they don’t have full rights, they’re being oppressed, they won’t be able to hear the real message of Jesus Christ. But here in the United States, there are several organizations founded specifically to preach to Jews. So, okay, we’ve gotten rid of the union of Church and State, so this is a great time to preach. And they start publishing books, and Jews kind of respond, and most of the stuff is actually very very polite and very tepid, but it does sort of lay out the foundations of a new set of arguments between Jews and Christians based on theological issues. And there are some some real whoppers in there where Jewish leaders say, “Well, we believe in the promises of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament,” and they bring up things that they don’t agree with in the New Testament, and they talk. They’re able to openly talk about, you know, when we find Christian missionaries in the doorways of our synagogues, this is really annoying. This doesn’t encourage us to convert. It is a way for Jews and Christians to speak to each other on what are very touchy issues, but they’re able to speak openly. They’re able to sort of sort of speak as equals. And there’s even times when Jews and Christians will debate each other in public, and then nothing happens to either of them, which again is just a huge step forward. It leads to a real flowering of Jews thinking about, “Okay, now that we have religious choice, why Judaism? What is it that makes our faith distinctive?” So it leads to a lot of self-analysis of Jews, and that in turn is part of what makes new synagogues.

00:17:16
Speaker 1: And of course all this debate within and among Jews and Christians—well, this battle of ideas—was not only good for the churches and the synagogues, it was good for America. And when we come back, more from Adam Jortner on the story of the Jews in America during the Revolution. Here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of the Jews around the American Revolution. Picking up where we last left off is Adam Jortner, and he teaches history and religion at Auburn University, and his book A Promised Land is a must-read. I urge you to go to Amazon or the usual suspects, pick up the book. You start your book in July of seventeen seventy-six with a man named Jonas Phillips shipping a copy of a very dangerous document across the Atlantic.

00:18:40
Speaker 3: Who was he and what was that dangerous document?

00:18:43
Speaker 2: Jonas Phillips is a Jewish merchant. He’s living in Philadelphia. He’s a patriot, and he’s sending the Declaration of Independence to some friends back in Europe. And he writes the letter in Yiddish, because, again, you’re not allowed. It’s illegal to ship the Declaration of Independence. It’s an illegal document. So he writes the letter in Yiddish. We have a copy of it, fortunately, that it got saved because it got captured by the British. And he says this. He says, “The American army is full of one hundred thousand rook them,” and rookhim is Yiddish for tough guys. And the British found this letter, could not translate the Yiddish, and assumed it was written in some kind of code, and it got stuck in British archives for one hundred and fifty years. But I think it’s really—I love this story. And Phillips goes on to become president of the synagogue in Philadelphia, funds money for naval operations, joins the militia. He’s a really serious patriot, and he’s a guy who speaks both Yiddish and English, a very devoted Jew as well. And it’s seventeen seventy-six, and the Declaration is just hot off the presses. It’s an example of how Jews saw this moment of Revolution, this moment of becoming a separate nation to cleave to the idea that all peop…