The U.S. and the Rest
Old and New Paradigms of Early American Jewish History
JOHN M. DIXON
In December 1859, at a monthly meeting of the New-York Historical Society, Rabbi Arnold Fischel of Congregation Shearith Israel delivered a seminal presentation, “The History of the Jews in America,” that anticipated and influenced the development of American Jewish history as a field of historical study.1 Though the full body of Fischel’s paper no longer exists, its skeleton can be recovered from contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts. On December 7, 1859, the New York Times reported:
Dr. Fischell commenced the record of his investigations from the year 1492, when, by royal edict, the Jews were banished from Spain. Following the unhappy nation from Spain to Brazil, from Brazil to the West Indies, and thence to New-Amsterdam, he gave his testimony to the joy they felt when they set foot upon a free shore. The bravery and patriotism of the Jews, in connection with the American nation, were both presented. In conclusion he read a letter from Gen. Washington to the Jews in Newport, Rhode Island, in which he (Gen. Washington) lauded their patriotism. 2
Later, an article published in The Historical Magazine recounted:
[Fischel] traced the fortunes of a band of his countrymen from Spain, whence they were banished, about the time of the discovery of America, to Brazil, thence to the West Indies, and thence to New Amsterdam, where they were received with coldness under the administration of Peter Stuyvesant, and again compelled to depart. He spoke handsomely of the condition of the Jews at Newport, and in conclusion read the letter (apparently from the original) of General Washington, in reply to an address from that body.3
The subsequent monthly issue of The Historical Magazine contained Fischel’s “Chronological Notes,” a related set of jottings that extended American Jewish history deep into the nineteenth century. Its final entry read, “1859—Two hundred thousand Israelites in the United States, thirty thousand of whom reside in New York.”4
In many ways, these journalistic summaries and historical notes are the ancestral fossils of current early American Jewish historiography. They predate the 1892 founding of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) by over three decades. Yet their contours are eminently recognizable today. Like Fischel’s sketch, general narratives of early American Jewish history published throughout the twentieth century routinely move from Spain to Brazil to the Caribbean to New Amsterdam to British North America and, ultimately, to the United States. In doing so, they reduce a vast transatlantic story down to a geographically narrower national tale, affirm the longevity and continuity of a relatively monolithic North American Jewish community, and assert the ethnic diversity, inclusivity, and exceptionalism of the United States.
This chapter explores why the study of Jews in early America became stuck in such a nationalist narrative rut. How did a linear, centralistic, and United States–oriented framing of early American Jewish history gain dominance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And why did it face relatively few challenges given that twentieth-century scholars were quite aware of the wider history of Jews throughout the Western Hemisphere?
To answer these questions, this chapter revisits some of the substantial nineteenth-century and twentieth-century cultural work that welded early American Jewish history to the history of the United States, and consequently marginalized early modern Caribbean and South American Jewish history. Other scholars have examined how commemorative events and museums constructed and disseminated national versions of early American Jewish history.5 Because it is primarily concerned with the academic field of American Jewish history, this chapter foregrounds historical writing and scholarly debates within the AJHS. It identifies two distinct historiographical phases: first, the 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century, when the Fischel paradigm, as it were, took hold despite the fact that some founders of the AJHS preferred a hemispheric or even global definition of American Jewish history; and, second, the period between the 1940s and 1990s when the Fischel paradigm gained further institutional backing as the field of America Jewish history became an established part of the academic profession.
The final section of this chapter juxtaposes three scholarly reflections on the Atlantic Jewish history published between 2009 and 2014, showing that historians reacted to the emergence of Atlantic Jewish history as a new area of study in the early 2000s with a mix of enthusiasm, caution, and frustration. That initial wave of scholarship on Atlantic Jewish history opened new pathways for research but failed to displace the traditional, national paradigm of early American Jewish history. With a few years of hindsight, we can now see that conceptual blurriness about the scope and purpose of Atlantic Jewish history was a major hindrance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Scholars established a starting platform for overhauling early American Jewish history, but they did not articulate a coherent and compelling Atlantic alternative to Fischel’s nation-oriented framework. Problems within the wider field of Atlantic history were largely to blame. Atlantic history rose quickly to prominence in the early 2000s as a part of a broad-based turn toward transnational methods and agendas in the social sciences and humanities. However, by 2010 the first burst of enthusiasm for the field had started to wane. Voices of criticism had grown louder. Other forms of supranational history, particularly global history, had assumed priority for many scholars and academic institutions. Also, the distinctive temporal and geographical identity of Atlantic history had become harder to discern as transnational and oceanic histories flourished. While the initial success of Atlantic history as a field had sparked a strong desire in the early 2000s for a new Atlantic-oriented conception of early American Jewish history, the subsequent diminishing and questioning of Atlantic history obstructed the growth of a new Atlantic Jewish history paradigm.
The field of American Jewish history took formal shape in the final years of the nineteenth century, coincidentally around the time that Fischel died in 1894. It has been pointed out elsewhere that educated and well-established Jews organized the AJHS in 1892 largely in response to the mass immigration of impoverished European Jews to North America, as well as growing antisemitism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Academic and community leaders envisioned the AJHS as a way to demonstrate publicly that Jews had been present in North America ever since the colonial era and, furthermore, that Jews had contributed significantly to the founding and eventual success of the American nation.6 Public interest in the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first arrival in the Americas provided another motivation for the founding of the AJHS, as did sister developments on the other side of the Atlantic, where an Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition held in London in 1887, the initiation of the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1888, and the launch of the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1893 created an institutional footing for Jewish historical scholarship in Britain.7
The founders of the AJHS were aware of Fischel’s earlier contribution. Writing in the 1890s, lawyer and historian Max J. Kohler, one of the most active early members of the AJHS, highlighted Fischel’s 1859 lecture and “Chronological Notes” on more than one occasion.8 Still, the Fischel paradigm was not the only grand vision of American Jewish history circulating at that time. In fact, at the initial planning meeting of the AJHS held in New York in June 1892, several delegates spoke against restricting the study of American Jewish history to the traditional confines of U.S. history. Advocating alternative hemispheric and global approaches, they argued that the field of American Jewish history would lack relevancy if it was construed narrowly in North American terms. In response, and seeking to carve out ground for a compromise, Harvard historian Charles Gross proposed that the AJHS might prioritize the history of Jews in the United States while simultaneously welcoming supplemental research on South America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Gross additionally suggested the AJHS could function on this provisional basis until enough archival research had been completed for a clear, overall picture of the field to emerge.9 The AJHS founders settled on this strategy of deferment and defined their mission in June 1892 as “the collection, preservation and publication of material having reference to the settlement and history of the Jews on the American Continent.” In so doing, they launched the AJHS with a nebulous research agenda and ambiguous geographical identity.10
This situation was perhaps unavoidable. National history dominated the academic discipline of history as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century.11 Yet any full rejection of Atlantic and hemispheric aspects of American Jewish history would have cut against the grain of the Columbia quadricentennial celebrations of the late 1880s and early 1890s. From the perspective of American Jewish history, three entangled events of 1492 demanded consideration—and none of them directly concerned North America. Christian conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula was the earliest. On January 2, 1492, the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who had unified the Crowns of Aragon and Castile through their marriage, entered Granada and took formal control of the last remnant of Muslim Iberia. After almost eight hundred years of partial (and sometimes nearly complete) Islamic domination, the whole peninsula, now divided into the kingdoms of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, came under Christian rule once more. The second major act of 1492—Jewish expulsion from Castile, Aragon, and the Spanish-controlled islands of Sicily and Sardinia—followed months later. On March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued an edict ordering the removal of all Jews who would not submit to Christian conversion from these Spanish territories by the end of July. Finally, Europe commenced its expansion into the Americas. On August 3, a Spanish-sponsored Italian navigator departed the Andalusian port of Palos with the misguided intention of sailing west to Asia. Christopher Columbus and his cosmopolitan crew, among them several Jewish converts to Christianity, made landfall in the Bahamas that October, commencing centuries of European and Euro-descendant colonization, settlement, and slaving in the Caribbean islands and American continents.
The intersection of these three episodes understandably preoccupied scholars of American Jewish history at the time of the Columbus quadri-centennial and therefore kept the Caribbean islands and South American continent in their gaze. In 1894 Meyer Kayserling, author of a pioneering study, Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries, commissioned and published roughly in parallel with the founding of the AJHS and translated from German into English by Charles Gross, declared, “Where the history of the Jews in Spain ends, that of the Jews in America begins.”12 Such claims for the importance of 1492 invited scholarly consideration of Caribbean and South American facets of American Jewish history just as the AJHS gathered momentum.
Although Fischel had similarly accepted 1492 as the starting point for American Jewish history and still managed to leap from Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas to European settlement in North America, two additional factors hindered the AJHS founders from performing the same trick in the 1890s. First, overseas corresponding members, including Pinkus Hilfman, a Dutch Jew and religious teacher living in Suriname, insisted on the historical importance of early modern Caribbean and South American Jews. Second, the earliest and most prominent members of the AJHS favored inductive over deductive reasoning. In 1892, at the first annual meeting of the AJHS, society president Oscar Straus projected a “scientific” or “modern” undertaking designed “to bring out the facts” of “early American history.”13 Combined with Gross’s strategy of deferment, the AJHS’s commitment to empiricism discouraged the setting of hard-and-fast rules about the geography and chronology of American Jewish history. Consequently, papers on South American, Central American, and Caribbean topics featured regularly at the annual “scientific” meetings of the AJHS and in the society’s journal, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society.14
Hilfman ensured Suriname received particular attention. In 1907 he published information about that Dutch colony and announced his intention to produce an English translation of Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam), an important 1788 Surinamese-Jewish contribution to the Enlightenment and, arguably, the first major study of American Jewish history.15 At the same time, other scholars promoted research on the Mexican Inquisition. Cyrus Adler, the chief organizer of the AJHS and one of several scholars who, in his own words, “yielded” to the “fascination” of American territory beyond the boundaries of the United States, published a lengthy assessment and extracted transcription of an alleged Judaizer’s Mexican trial in the Publications in 1896.16 Three years later, Adler’s edited manuscript of another Mexican Inquisition trial filled the journal’s entire 1899 issue.17
Notwithstanding the AJHS’s initial commitment to empiricism and reluctance toward imposing a paradigm for American Jewish history, certain underlying themes and threads soon emerged in the historiography in these years. The perceived cruelty of the Mexican Inquisition was one. Starting in the early twentieth century, historians of American Jewry labeled the Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 as “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers” who escaped South American persecution.18 The significance of Jewish maritime commerce constituted a second major theme. Kohler was among the scholars who sought to generate an overview of American Jewish history. In several important pieces published between 1894 and 1902, he documented a Jewish trade network spanning “Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Levant, Holland, England, Brazil, Spanish America, Curaçao, Jamaica and the West Indies, Surinam and New York.” Decades before the term “trading diaspora” entered academic discourse, he affirmed that in an age “when people were in the habit of dealing largely with their immediate neighbors,” Jews had the advantage of being able to conduct overseas trade through webs of trusted coreligionists based in regions with different commercial products and needs.19
During the 1890s, and somewhat paradoxically, themes of inquisitional persecution in Ibero-America and economic opportunity in the early modern Atlantic combined to organize the field of American Jewish history in ways that prioritized the United States and separated out historically entangled Iberian, Dutch, and English maritime empires. As early as 1894, Oscar Straus directly connected the “persecution of the Jews in Spain and Portugal and their dispersion to the four corners of the earth” to the development of Dutch, English, and North American “international commerce.” Following Kohler’s argument, he claimed Jewish networks advanced “the trade of the Italian republics with the Levant, and of Holland, England and New England with Surinam, Barbados, Jamaica and Brazil.”20 These statements gave an early hint of a periodization and thematic framing of early American Jewish history that sharply contrasted the suffering of Iberian crypto-Jews with the commercial success and religious freedoms of Jewish merchants in Dutch and English America and, particularly, the United States. In the 1894 issue of the Publications, Kayserling further confirmed this schema by projecting the history of colonial American Jewry as a narrative of persecuted crypto-Jews and Judeoconversos in Spanish and Portuguese America, and tolerated Sephardic Jews in Dutch and British territories.21
From the mid-1890s onward, the field of American Jewish history relied on the twin themes of progressive commercialization and liberty to justify closing an initial Atlantic-wide aperture down to the United States. To be sure, this trend did not go entirely unquestioned. In 1908, having succeeded Straus as AJHS president, Adler bluntly recognized that “no university or college has established a chair of American Jewish history, nor even a regular or systematic course of lectures on the subject.” He urged scholars of American Jewry to look beyond the United States and embrace some form of transatlantic or even global Jewish history.22 Soon afterwards, the AJHS restated its mission in a way that gave additional prominence to international movements and events, while reaffirming its primary interest as “the settlement and history of Jews on the American continent.”23 Even so, the field of American Jewish history continued to consolidate around a United States–centric framework. Without a coherent alternative on offer, early twentieth-century practitioners of American Jewish historiography effectively ignored Adler’s concerns and adopted a new version of the Fischel paradigm.
The publication of journalist Peter Wiernik’s popular survey, The History of the Jews in America, in 1912 marked the completion of this process. A book usually remembered for its assertion that Jews migrated to the United States in distinctive Sephardic, German, and east European waves, Wiernik’s History is equally notable for its division (à la Fischel) of early American Jewish history into successive Iberian, Dutch-British, and United States phases. Through these nationalized containers, Wiernik traced a stadial progression from Iberian persecution and medievalism to United States tolerance, enlightenment, and modernity.24 Wiernik thus played a key role in establishing an expanded version of the Fischel paradigm in popular and academic memory by the second decade of the twentieth century.
In many ways, the middle decades of the twentieth century were as critical to the development of American Jewish history as the 1890s. The situation of Jews in the United States changed dramatically after 1924, when the Immigration (or Johnson-Reed) Act passed by Congress amid a climate of growing antisemitism in America abruptly ended a century of Jewish mass migration that had bought approximately 3 million European Jews to the United States since 1820, with over 2.5 million of them landing after 1880. By the start of the Second World War, the majority of the Jews of the United States were American born. Moreover, as a group, they had broadly achieved middle-class status.25 The mass slaughter of European Jews during the Second World War meant that United States Jewry became the largest Jewish population in the world. Burdened with new global responsibility, Jewish community leaders in the United States, fretting about cultural assimilation during the prosperous postwar years, increasingly saw American Jewish history as a means to elevate Jewish identity. In 1947 the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati organized the American Jewish Archives under the leadership of historian Jacob Rader Marcus. Scholarship on American Jewish history that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized that American Jewry remained a distinct ethnic and religious entity even as American Jews embraced the mainstream culture of the United States.26
One illustrative feature of this period was the unprecedented national attention thrust upon the Jews of colonial Newport, Rhode Island, whom President George Washington had met and corresponded with in 1790. Even prior to the 1940s, the public knew Washington’s letter to Newport’s Jewry. Indeed, Fischel had brought the original copy, then in private hands, with him to the New-York Historical Society in 1859. Its text had later appeared, along with that of all Washington’s correspondence with Jewish American congregations, in the 1895 issue of the AJHS’s Publications and in Wiernik’s 1912 History.27 Also, during the 1930s, Rabbi Lee Levinger had included extracts of these presidential exchanges in his textbook of American Jewish history, and Rabbi Morris Gutstein had added a facsimile of Washington’s 1790 letter to his history of Jews in Newport.28 All the same, a series of events pushed Washington’s Newport correspondence further into the limelight in the 1940s. First, in 1940, a national radio broadcast and a special service at Newport’s Touro Synagogue marked the 150th anniversary of Washington’s visit to Rhode Island.29 Two years later, Lee Friedman’s Jewish Pioneers and Patriots asserted Washington’s 1790 letters to Jewish American congregations “gave point to the theory of American democracy which, finally and expressly embodied in 1791 in the Bill of Rights, struck from the Jews of the United States the shackles of disabilities.”30 In 1944, the American Jewish Committee reproduced Washington’s Newport letter at the front of a pamphlet on antisemitism that derived its title, To Bigotry No Sanction, from the most famous phrase in Washington’s exchange with Newport Jewry.31 In 1946, the Touro Synagogue gained official recognition as a national historic site. Subsequently, in 1947–48, Washington’s Newport letter reached millions of Americans as part of the Freedom Train, a travelling exhibit of national historical documents that displayed Washington’s missive alongside such documents as the Mayflower Compact, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.32
The reputation of Washington’s Newport letter as a crucial founding expression of U.S. religious tolerance and liberalism only continued to rise as U.S. Jewry adjusted to its new status as the largest Jewish population in the world. Simultaneously, the factors that boosted the standing of this document pushed non–North American aspects of early American Jewish history deeper into the background. In 1947, Hyman Grinstein pronounced in a review published in the William and Mary Quarterly that “strictly speaking, only elements in American civilization which were directly affected by the impact of Jews living in the United States may be considered within the province of American Jewish history.”33 Historians worked in broad agreement with this statement for the subsequent three or four decades, turning the vitality of North American Jewish communal life and the persistence of Jewish culture in North America into central themes of American Jewish historiography.34 As president of the AJHS, Friedman declared to the 1950 annual meeting of the society, “American Jewish history has come of age,” and urged his audience to demonstrate that Jews participated in American history “naturally and as natively as any other elements of our citizenry,” while preserving their Jewish identity. Ethnic and political diversity was America’s strength, Friedman asserted. “Culture rebels at uniformity.”35 The following year, he told a meeting of the New-York Historical Society that “cultural pluralism is upon what American democracy feeds.”36 Evidently, he regarded cultural pluralism as the coexistence of distinct, compartmentalized cultures within the United States, rather than an entangling or intermixing of cultures.
The centralizing and nationalistic trends established earlier in the twentieth century therefore flourished in the second half of the twentieth century. Building on the work of their predecessors, mid-century scholars of early American Jewry described the Dutch and, more especially, British North American colonies as sanctuaries of religious tolerance that presaged the liberalism of the United States. Emphasizing the exceptionalism of America, they asserted that Jews of the United States did not experience the protracted and tortuous emancipation process that marked the start of modern European Jewish history, but rather benefited (with relatively little effort on their part) from the inclusivity and tolerance afforded all white ethnic groups in North America. In 1947, Abram Goodman characterized the colonial era as an “overture” and “era of gestation . . . rich in promise of the America that was to be.”37 Three years later, Salo Baron observed that colonial Jews were “as a rule, incorporated in the American body politic, so to say, in complete absentmindedness.”38 In 1954 Oscar Handlin remarked, “the Revolution and independence completed the process begun in the American colonial past.”39 Henry Feingold, in his 1974 survey of American Jewish history, Zion in America, in a chapter titled “The Genesis of American Religious Tolerance,” wrote, “it was during the Colonial period that the basic outlines of the American-Jewish relationship were established . . . that relationship was even for its time remarkably free from religious bigotry.”40
As the exceptional tolerance and liberalism of the United States became guiding themes of early American Jewish historiography in the second half of the twentieth century, historians broadly concurred that Jewish men enjoyed many civil and some political rights in the North American colonies, and that Jewish men, along with other white male citizens, gained full political rights under the Constitution of the United States. They left some room for disagreement within this consensus. Most notably, historians differed on the importance of the revolutionary and founding eras as turning points, though this quarrel was more an issue of emphasis than a clash of opposing viewpoints. The scholarship most concerned with the attainment of formal citizenship status and full political rights tended to perceive the Revolution as transformative rather than a continuation of colonial trends, but it also recognized that Jews enjoyed a remarkable degree of religious and economic liberty in the colonial era.
Jacob Rader Marcus, the founding director of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the preeminent scholar of American Jewish history at that time, confirmed the ascendancy of this nationalistic model with his 1958 article, “The Periodization of American Jewish History,” originally an address to the AJHS annual meeting, which recommended widespread adoption of Wiernik’s “natural and correct” 1912 division of American Jewish history into “three ‘successive strata of immigration.’” In that light, and with the assertion that Sephardim dominated Jewish communal life in North America until 1840, notwithstanding the fact that Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim in North America from the 1720s, he proposed a quadripartite schema of Sephardic (1654–1840), German (1841–1920), east European (1852–1920), and American (1921–) epochs. Paralleling Wiernik even further, Marcus subdivided the Sephardic stage into colonial Dutch (1654–64), colonial English (1664–1776), and early national (1776–1840) phases. By assuming 1654 as his starting point, he bypassed the complications and entanglements of Caribbean and South American history. However, he imbued his schema with progressive momentum by characterizing Peter Stuyvesant’s Dutch New Netherland as “medieval—in the worse sense of the term.” According to Marcus, then, the seeds of modernity only sprouted in the British era, when “mercantilists” granted “economic opportunities, adequate civil and religious rights, and ample scope for cultural advancement,” but not political liberties, to Jewish settlers. Full Jewish Emancipation in North America later arrived under the auspices of the United States, “first on the Federal level through the new Federal Constitution,” and then on the state level.41
Between 1958 and his death in 1995, Marcus filled out this periodization in exhaustive detail in his three-volume study, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 (1970), the four-volume United States Jewry, 1776–1985 (1989–93), and the comparatively bite-sized, single-volume narrative history, The American Jew, 1585–1990 (1995).42 In this way, he confirmed the national trajectory of early American Jewish history. The first of these works, for instance, opened with a preliminary section on South America, Central America, and the insular Caribbean, and then a section on Dutch New Netherland, before concentrating extensively on British North America. As Marcus explained in his preface, he emphasized colonial North American Jewry fully aware that “it was of lesser contemporary importance than the Jewries to the south,” but believing that the longer history of American Jewry centered on the United States.43 Moving beyond the colonial era, Marcus divided United States Jewry into “The Sephardic Period” (1776–1840; volume 1), “The Germanic Period” (1841–1920; volumes 2 and 3), and “The East European Period” (1852–1920; volume 4), with an epilogue on the “Emergence of the American Jew.” Marcus subsequently repeated this pattern in The American Jew, which condensed the colonial period (dated as 1500–1776) into 41.5 pages of text, 4.5 of which covered the ancient and medieval European backstory. The early national period (1776–1840) received 43 pages of text and opened with a chapter titled “Jews Become Citizens.”
Besides raising the evidential standard and confirming a preexisting periodization, strict North American focus, and underlying narrative of progressive Emancipation, Marcus’s several tomes consolidated the writing of early American Jewish history around five core avenues of investigation: Jewish settlement; Jewish legal and political status; Jewish economic activity; Jewish religion and charity; and Jewish–Gentile relations. These strands, which can be traced back to the work of Adler, Kohler, and other historians working in the 1890s and early 1900s, undergirded The Colonial American Jew, volume one of United States Jewry, and The American Jew. To illustrate this point, we might consider a section titled “The English Period in North American Jewish History” that appeared in The American Jew. Its ten subheadings—“Where They Settled,” “Rights and Disabilities,” “How They Made a Living,” “Religious Life and Organization,” “What Did These Jews Believe?,” “Charity,” “Jewish Education and Culture,” “Rejection,” “America Accepts the Jews,” and “The Jews Accept America”—map neatly onto Marcus’s five main lines of inquiry.44
Marcus’s conception of early American Jewish history as a prelim to the history of Jews and Judaism in the United States meant that Caribbean and South American topics could only be partially incorporated even though Marcus was well aware of their historical significance. In fact, as director of the American Jewish Archives, he was closely involved around this time in an English translation of Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam.45 Furthermore, in 1952 he led an “expedition” to the insular Caribbean and South America with the primary goal of securing “copies of all Jewish manuscript materials up to the year 1800.”46 Also, he actively supported the completion and publication of Isaac Emmanuel and Suzanne Emmanuel’s impressive and important two-volume study, A History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (1970). The “history of the Jews of Curaçao forms an integral part of American Jewish history,” Isaac Emmanuel affirmed in his preface to that work, before adding with some exaggeration, “Small wonder Dr. Jacob R. Marcus devotes considerable space to Curaçao in his forthcoming book, The Colonial American Jew.”47
The Emmanuels’ deeply researched and chronologically organized study focused heavily on local and congregational matters on Curaçao and, albeit to a much lesser extent, other Dutch Caribbean islands. Like Marcus’s work, it emphasized the themes of settlement, rights, economics, religion, and Jewish–Gentile relations. However, it implied a radically different understanding of American Jewish history because it situated North America at the margins of the Caribbean, rather than vice versa. By asserting Curaçao’s mid-eighteenth-century role as the “mother community” of Caribbean Jewry, it quietly recentered early American Jewish history. Still, the primary concern of the Emmanuels in 1970 was not inventing a new historiographical paradigm, but addressing a contemporary decline of Sephardic Jewry on their island. Guiding their book was a strong desire to bring the “oldest [Sephardic] community in the Western Hemisphere” back to something like its mid-eighteenth-century heyday.48
Meanwhile, Marcus struggled to accommodate the Caribbean region in his Colonial American Jew, which sought to combine comprehensive coverage of all aspects of early American Jewish history within a framework that looked ahead to the history of Jews in the United States. The limitations of the Fischel paradigm and the classic Wiernikian periodization of American Jewish history were exposed when the colonial era was considered by itself. Marcus knew that the Jewish Caribbean communities remained vital and important well beyond 1654, the standard starting point for histories of Jews in North America. And so, having decided to provide full coverage of the insular Caribbean and South American Jewish communities, he could not simply invoke the settlement of Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654 as justification for pivoting away from Spanish-Portuguese America toward Dutch-British North America and, eventually, the United States. Instead, he opted for a transparent North American–centrism and declared at the outset of his book that his primary mission was to tell the history of Jews in North America, “notwithstanding the fact that the seventeenth century Dutch and English dependencies in Brazil, Surinam, and the West Indies were far more noteworthy than the North American mainland colonies.”49 On this basis, he drew only passing comparisons between the Caribbean and North American Jewish communities. Tellingly, he also concluded his seven-chapter discussion of “Spain, South America, Mexico, and the West Indian Islands” with a section, “The Road to New Amsterdam,” focused on 1654. In other words, having veered into unusual territory for general narratives of American Jewish history, he circled back to rejoin the traditional narrative track.50
Historian Moses Rischin immediately pointed out the limitations of Marcus’s approach. As one of the first Harvard University graduate students to focus on American Jewish history, as well as the author of a landmark 1962 study, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914, Rischin was at the vanguard of a new generation of professional scholars who greatly advanced American Jewish history as an academic field between the 1960s and the 1980s.51 In a 1973 review of The Colonial American Jew written for the William and Mary Quarterly, he delivered a sharp, penetrating assessment of the field of pre-1820 American Jewish history. He bemoaned how Marcus and other scholars had become lost in the “obscure, episodic, and inconsequential” history of Jews on the North American continent. Noting that “the Jews of the English and Dutch [Caribbean] islands outnumbered their coreligionists of North America by five to one and may have equaled the Jews of England” in the mid-eighteenth century, Rischin recommended something like an Atlantic or hemispheric turn in early American Jewish history. Significantly, he saw this shift as opening up an entirely new research agenda. The history of the Jewish Caribbean reveals the essential “paradoxes of Atlantic civilization,” Rischin contended. A year earlier, Edmund Morgan had identified the contemporaneous development of liberty and slavery in Virginia to be “the central paradox of American history.”52 Without mentioning Morgan, Rischin now identified a parallel phenomenon whereby Caribbean “slave islands” provided Jews with a degree of “personal and corporate dignity never before imagined in Christian Europe.” He recommended careful examination of Jews in “the Caribbean borderlands of warring empires,” essentially proposing a new synthesis of early American Jewish history that by taking the insular Caribbean as its focal point, would both expand “the horizons of American colonial history” and enlarge our “understanding of an emergent multi-national and multi-racial world.”53
Unfortunately, Rischin’s 1973 opposition to the nationalistic impulse of most early American Jewish historical writing fell on deaf ears. At that time, the field of American Jewish history was not only becoming more professionalized but also more focused on the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century United States. Ironically, Rischin had himself encouraged this trend away from the colonial era through his influential work, The Promised City.54 By the 1970s, the presence of Jews in colonial America and the contribution of Jews to the founding of the United States no longer demanded the attention they had received earlier in the twentieth century. This shift in research interests discouraged a large-scale reevaluation of early American Jewish history in the last decades of the twentieth century. Instead, surveys of American Jewish history continued to espouse narratives of the early modern period that echoed Fischel and Wiernik. Most ran as follows: expelled from Spain in 1492 (and having endured forced mass conversion to Christianity in Portugal in 1497), Jews arrived in North America following the fall of Dutch Brazil in 1654, forged lasting synagogue communities, generally prospered, and incrementally won civil and political rights under Dutch then English rule; full citizenship status duly arrived after the American Revolution; and, as Washington acknowledged in 1790, Jews were recognized as an integral part of the United States from the founding era onward.
A Time for Planting, Eli Faber’s 1992 survey of early American Jewish history, still the standard single-volume study of the period, repeated a version of this storyline even as it incorporated Atlantic aspects of Jewish history. As the first volume in a five-volume series on what was essentially the history of Jews in the United States, it performed the traditional task of reducing a geographically vast transatlantic scope down to the level of five or so colonial North American cities. Admittedly, in a chapter titled “The Atlantic World of Colonial Jewry,” as well as elsewhere in his book, Faber located North American Jews within Atlantic commercial and religious contexts. Overwhelmingly, however, A Time for Planting identified American Jewish history as a North American phenomenon. Its opening lines even proclaimed the landing of twenty-three Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654 as the beginning of American Jewish history.55
Concerted scholarly efforts to foreground Atlantic elements of early American Jewish history, as well as to establish Atlantic Jewish history as a new area of study, erupted around the turn of the millennium as part of a wider proliferation in Atlantic history scholarship and, more broadly, in transnational research across the social sciences and humanities.56 Two colloquia-inspired edited works on Atlantic Jewry appeared in 2001 and 2009 respectively.57 Another volume on Jews in the Caribbean was published in 2014.58 The essay collection The Sephardic Atlantic, which foregrounded postcolonial approaches to Jewish Atlantic studies, arrived in 2018.59 Meanwhile, several studies of the so-called “western Sephardic diaspora,” including Jonathan Israel’s mammoth Diasporas within a Diaspora, issued in 2002, engaged extensively with Atlantic and American themes.60 Research on Jews and the Atlantic slave trade, as well as on Jews and race in America, similarly flourished in and after the 1990s.61
Discussions of the “Port Jew”—a heuristic invention of the late 1990s—heightened academic interest in Jewish communities around the Atlantic littoral.62 By 2001, David Cesarani, director of the AHRB Parkes Research Centre for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations (now the Parkes Institute) at the University of Southampton, England, had instigated a five-year research project on Port Jews. In partnership with the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, Cesarani organized three international symposia, each of which produced separate collections of papers between 2002 and 2009.63 Meanwhile, the journal Jewish History devoted an issue to Port Jews in 2006,64 and a sizeable number of books and articles mentioned or discussed, sometimes critically, the Port Jew concept.65
Regrettably, these scholarly efforts of the late 1990s and early 2000s, while considerable and often insightful in their own way, failed to generate a comprehensive and cohesive Atlantic-oriented alternative to the traditional narratives of early American Jewish history. To a large degree, the underlying problem lay with the field of Atlantic history as a whole, rather than Atlantic Jewish history specifically. As David Armitage reflected in 2018, Atlantic history peaked as “a distinct field of study” in the early 2000s when “what was good for Atlantic history seemed to be good for oceanic history more generally, and even for transnational history tout court.”66 But these opening boom years did not produce a settled definition of Atlantic history as a field simultaneously connected to and distinctive from other supranational histories. Consequently, and in quite short order, “oceanic history and global history engulfed [Atlantic history] once more.”67
Adam Sutcliffe’s important historiographical contribution to the 2009 volume Atlantic Diasporas usefully illustrates how this broader issue within Atlantic history impacted discussions of Atlantic Jewish history during the early 2000s. Sutcliffe asserted the centrality of nation-oriented issues of rights, integration, and patriotism to early modern European Jewish life. He welcomed Atlantic history’s “power to destabilize traditional nation-based narratives of the past,” as well as to “challenge . . . the imagined fixity of all social categories.” Yet he simultaneously advised that Atlantic history was a Cold War artifice that had lost relevancy as globalization assumed popular and academic attention at the start of the twenty-first century. Atlantic history, Sutcliffe further warned, could preserve false West-East binaries and hinder “the study of global interconnections.” Additionally, “overemphasis on transnational flows of contact and exchange” could distract academics from the peculiarities of nations such as the United States.68 Overall, then, Sutcliffe judged the relative merits of national, Atlantic, and global perspectives of early modern Jewish history on the grounds of their contemporary political and intellectual appeal rather than, say, their ability to recover and explain the past on its own terms. Holly Snyder dismissed Sutcliffe’s piece in 2014 as “a historiographical apologetic for the sloth with which practitioners of Jewish history have approached the Atlantic paradigm.”69 While that assessment is fair, it should also be noted that Sutcliffe’s hesitancy was in keeping with a general scholarly “weariness” toward Atlantic history that emerged around 2009.70
The field of Atlantic history, we might now reflect, was a product more of the post–Cold War era than, as Sutcliffe indicated, the Cold War itself.71 Along with global history, Atlantic history marked a strong academic reaction that took hold in the 1990s and early 2000s against the nationalist methods and narratives that had dominated the social sciences and humanities in the United States and Europe since the nineteenth century.72 In line with that trend, scholars of early American Jewish history pressed the importance of both Atlantic and global approaches at the start of the twenty-first century, weakening the grip of the traditional national paradigm. Contributing to the 2014 volume on Jews in the Caribbean, Eli Faber lamented that almost all studies of early American Jewry are “limited to five congregations on the North American mainland—New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah—as well as a handful of settlers in the interior, and, later, joining the original five in the late eighteenth century, Richmond and Baltimore.” Faber then optimistically predicted “a new historiography, one that paints a far broader picture of early American Jewish history.”73 One logical outcome of global history, he explained, was a “shift among historians of American Jewish history away from their traditional isolationist perspective to viewing and analysing the settlements in North America, the Caribbean, the eastern Atlantic (the Canaries and Madeira), the north-eastern coast of South America (Suriname), and western Europe as an integrated entity spanning the Atlantic region.”74 Faber did not say exactly how, why, and when this region was “integrated” beyond asserting that commercial, religious, and kinship networks linked North American colonial Jews to other parts of the Atlantic basin. The main thrust of his chapter was to recommend rather than effect a “thorough rewriting of early American Jewish history” from an undefined Atlantic perspective.75
Rather than looking forward expectantly as Faber did, Holly Snyder expressed frustration in 2014 at the lack of interest shown by scholars of Jewish history in Atlantic approaches and urged more concerted action. In a sharp state-of-the-field assessment, she exposed “a self-reflexive defense of Jewish historiography as it is presently practiced, against the suspicion that an Atlantic Jewish paradigm might undermine the very premises on which more traditional forms of Jewish history writing have relied for several generations now.” Snyder faulted the methodological conservatism and defensive insularity of early modern Jewish historiography. Furthermore, she criticized persistence of traditional nationalist agendas and frameworks in the research and writing of Jewish history generally. “To date,” she wrote, “very few studies have actually approached Jewish history, in any degree, from an Atlanticist perspective.”76
Published in a five-year span, the essays of Sutcliffe, Faber, and Snyder collectively encapsulated a historiographical moment when, first, the study of Atlantic Jewish history was gathering pace but also struggling to get off the ground and, second, when Atlantic history was losing its predominance as a transnational and oceanic field. Practitioners of Atlantic Jewish history faced the daunting prospect of having to establish their own area of study while simultaneously helping to reenergize the parent field of Atlantic history. Fortunately, a valuable new methodology was in the works.
Like Atlantic history, entangled history emerged after the Cold War amid rising interest in transnational and global scales of history. It was one of several related historical approaches (including histoire croisée, connected history, and shared history) that appeared in Europe and the United States during the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the United States especially, entangled history also intersected with borderland history.77 These affiliated approaches all sought to move beyond traditional national frameworks without resorting to comparative history, which oftentimes preserves national entities even as it seeks to transcend them through comparison. Put simply, entangled history crosses borders and straddles boundaries. It prioritizes the intersections, interconnections, and intermingling of national and imperial spaces. Similarly, it views social and cultural categories as dynamic, permeable, and intersecting. It therefore decries the sort of neat historical compartmentalization, fixed religious identities, clear through-lines, and North American exceptionalism that underpin both older and newer surveys of early American Jewish history.
Can entangled history produce the sort of coherent and historically precise Atlantic paradigm required to dislodge early American Jewish history from its old nationalist assumptions and narratives? To achieve that goal, historians will need to do more than provide microstudies and vague allusions to Atlantic scales of analysis. A more rigorous Atlantic framework will need to be constructed. Toward this end, Aviva Ben-Ur’s important 2020 study of Jews in Suriname made a critical intervention by expressly naming four cardinal principles of Atlantic Jewish history: “the demographic and economic centrality of Caribbean Jewry among hemispheric American Jewries; Portuguese Jewish hegemony among Jews in the Atlantic World; the era of slavery; and the triad of privileges, disabilities, and Jewish Emancipation.”78 By restating these core elements of Atlantic Jewish history in the introduction to this book, Ben-Ur and Klooster have rightly brought them further to the fore.
One of the core advantages of entangled history is its ability to interconnect such framing principles with particular sites where social, political, and cultural negotiations, accommodations, and contingencies are most palpable. Micro and macro scales are interactive in entangled history. Discarding predefined containers or units of study (such as isolated nations), practitioners of entangled history emphasize the shared processes by which short-term actions on the ground shaped long-term expansive structures, and vice versa.79 For this reason, entangled history can help to address some of the foundational methodological and interpretative challenges of American Jewish history as a field. As we have seen, the question of how to balance general and empirical approaches to history occupied the founders of the AJHS. They postponed setting the geographical and chronological boundaries of American Jewish history in the name of “scientific” research. Unfortunately, their strategy of deferment only served to silence Atlantic and hemispheric impulses and entrench a nationalist approach. It is time to restart the conversation about the Atlantic parameters and master narratives of American Jewish history that was put on hold one century ago. And entangled history needs to be part of that discussion.