'A Promised Land' Review: Jewish Roots of the Tree of Liberty
In 1770, amid the stirrings of what would become the American Revolution, a Jewish Pennsylvanian named Barnard Gratz wrote a letter to a friend. In it, he shared his unfiltered opinion of George III’s latest address. “I was going to inclose you the king’s speech to parlement,” Gratz wrote, but it “was such narishkeit”—foolishness—“that [it] is not worth the postage.”
In the pivotal summer of 1776, the British seized a letter from Jonas Phillips, another Philadelphia-based Jew, intended for his business partner in the Netherlands. Enthusiastic about America’s bid for freedom, Phillips had enclosed a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The British could not make heads or tails of Phillips’s missive and assumed it was in code. It had been written in Yiddish.
The story of how Jews during the Revolutionary era sought and subsequently celebrated freedom in America—and worked to expand the parameters of liberty for all Americans—receives its definitive telling in Adam Jortner’s “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom.”
The faith of Jews in the American project took many forms, as Mr. Jortner, a scholar of religion and history at Auburn University, documents. On May 17, 1776, Gershom Seixas, hazan (ritual leader) of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, coordinated a day of fasting and prayer, as recommended by the Continental Congress. Revolutionary Jews not only prayed in the pews, they fought in the field. David Cardozo battled at Savannah and Charleston. A century and a half later, his descendant Benjamin would serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Hart Jacobs received exemption from New York’s militia on Friday nights so that he could keep the Sabbath. Haym Salomon partnered with Robert Morris, a delegate at the Continental Congress and one of the Declaration’s signers, in securing funding for the fight.
This service was repaid in kind: Gen. Washington and others promoted at least 15 Jewish soldiers to officer status, a rank, Mr. Jortner notes, that Jews were not permitted to achieve in Europe. Such actions made Washington a figure greatly respected among American Jews. Congregation Beth Shalome of Richmond, Va., literally wrote his name into the traditional prayer recited for God’s protection of the government—the first letter of each line formed an acrostic, with Hebrew letters spelling out “Vashington.”
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