Scholar Jonathan Sarna describes a minority of Jews in early America as “critics, subversives and dissenters.”
Why would they act that way? Perhaps it’s a simple function of identity theory. The more strongly you identify with your group, such as Jewish, the more likely you are to view negatively out-groups (gentiles).
The greater society affects how minority group express their identity. In America prior the 1960s, it was socially unacceptable to publicly display greater loyalty to your minority group, or a foreign nation, than to America.
Minority group are not likely to be as patriotic as the majority (though Jews come closer than any other minority group in America) who have organized the country to their benefit.
Why would any society want a group within it that has many members bent on subversion? I guess there are many benefits to the majority to house subversive minorities. I can’t think of any right off-hand. I know Israel is not thrilled with having non-Jewish citizens who subvert it. Rabbis are very careful about who they convert (and they make the Orthodox process arduous) to avoid bringing subverters into the Jewish people.
I might be missing something, but it is not at all clear to me that the subversives listed in Dr. Sarna’s essay below made America better.
Jews who make porn are also being “subversive.”
To quote Mark Twain, the Jew is everywhere a stranger and not even the angels like strangers. The more Jews set themselves apart in a gentile country, the less likely they will be viewed by the majority as fellow citizens engaged in a common enterprise.
How does any group react to people who join it and then subvert? I am unaware of any countries and peoples that are thrilled by that.
… Jews did impact upon early American culture is where they cast themselves as critics, subversives and dissenters. As non-Christians, Jews at that time in the United States, however white and wealthy they may have been, were by their very existence cultural outsiders and religious non-conformists. If, following the Oxford English Dictionary, to be culturally subversive means to challenge and undermine “a conventional idea, form, genre, etc., especially by using or presenting it in a new or unorthodox way,” then Jews of that time were disproportionately subversive. Indeed, some of the most important works in the Milberg collection reflect precisely that kind of oppositional stance.
The best known Jews of the era dissented from the mainstream in their persons, by being Jews, and in their writings, by setting themselves apart from those with whom they disagreed, but still observed strict limits. People like the journalist-politician-playwrights Mordecai Noah (1785-1851) and Isaac Harby (1788-1828), and the journalist-religious-and-communal-leaders, Isaac Leeser (1806-1868), and Isaac M. Wise (1819-1900), all of them well-represented in “By Dawn’s Early Light,” were careful not unduly to shock or outrage non-Jewish readers for fear of being marginalized. Noah, for example, was known for never failing “to resent the least aggression on the character of his people.” Nevertheless, he defended a Charleston “blue law,” forbidding the sale and exposure for sale of goods on Sunday, as “a mere local or police regulation, which should be carried into effect by all religious denominations.” “Respect to the laws of the land we live in,” he reminded his fellow Jews, “is the first duty of good citizens of all denominations.” Isaac Leeser similarly reassured Christians in his early work, The Claims of the Jews to an Equality of Rights (1841), that “we wish not to interfere with you, we wish not…to unsettle your hopes and convictions,” even as he understood that in presenting Jewish “claims” he was distancing himself from many of his neighbors. Later, in discussing the messiah in one of his discourses, he expressed a willingness “to attack, to a certain extent, the opinions of the majority of the people among whom we live,” but did so only after a prolonged apologia and with the utmost of caution.
Instead of focusing on these better known interlocutors, here I want to focus on culturally creative Jews of this era who dissented more openly from the mainstream—and in a few cases paid a price. These “subversive Jews” never became household names, even in American Jewish historical circles, and some, until rescued by this exhibit, have been almost totally forgotten. Their bold challenges to the norms of their time nevertheless pushed boundaries. Freedoms that we enjoy today are in some part due to their audacity and courage…
Ernestine Rose (1810-1892), the best known Jewish atheist and women’s rights leader of her day, would soon spurn that advice. Born in Poland, where her father was a rabbi, she refused a marriage arranged by her father, and after stints in France and Holland, moved to England in 1830, where she fell under the spell of the socialist reformer, Robert Owen, and married a fellow Owenite in a civil ceremony. Arriving in New York in 1836 accompanied by her husband, she quickly won success on the speaking circuit and became a celebrated women’s rights and human rights advocate as well as a proponent of radical freethought. She described herself as “but a daughter of poor, crushed Poland, and the down-trodden and persecuted people called the Jews, ‘a child of Israel,’” when she pleaded for the “equal rights of her sex,” in 1852 in an address to the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention. A year later, addressing her “sisters” at a debate between supporters of the Bible and infidels, she created an uproar when she asked “do you wish to be free? Then you must trample the Bible, the church, and the priests under your feet.” To her mind, freedom for slaves, women and Jews were intertwined: “I go for emancipation of all kinds,” she explained, “white and black, man and woman. … I go for the recognition of human rights, without distinction of sect, party, sex or color.” Her motto, which she recommended to social reformers everywhere, was “Agitate! Agitate!”
Ernestine Rose was both conscious and proud of her subversive stance. “I know but too well what it is to go against the long-cherished and time-honored prejudices and superstitions,” she admitted in an 1853 speech. “It is no pleasant task to go against the current, but there is a sense of duty that balances all unpleasantness.” Perhaps because she was so unorthodox in advocating full equality for women, opposing slavery, and defending atheism, the Jewish community of her day completely ignored her. Not one mention of her name has so far turned up in any pre-Civil War Jewish newspaper. Years later, in 1890, when her name was brought to the attention of the editor of the American Israelite, he confessed with some surprise that “we never heard of Mrs. Rose before.” Nevertheless, Rose continued to identify herself with the Jewish people, and during the Civil War she vigorously and repeatedly defended them against attacks by Horace Seaver editor of the freethought weekly, The Boston Investigator.
Ernestine Rose was far from being a “typical” American Jew of her time. Samuel B.H. Judah, Isaac Gomez, Solomon Henry Jackson, Uriah P. Levy, and the other subversive Jews who, we have seen, violated the cultural conventions of their day were far from typical either. All alike, pushed the bounds of propriety—speaking out against hypocrisy, prejudice, and against the social and religious norms of their time. Even if ignored or persecuted by those around them, we know, in retrospect, that these men and women broadened and enlivened American culture. Some paid a heavy price for doing so.
The bulk of Jews in antebellum America, even if they differed from the mainstream in matters of religion, were, of course, far from subversive. They kept their heads down and their mouths shut. Seeking to win their neighbors’ respect, they strove mightily to behave well. But they too paid a price. Their names go unrecorded in the annals of American Jewish culture and they left nothing for Leonard Milberg to collect. The moral, proclaimed by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich with respect to women, is no less true with respect to Jews: the well-behaved ones seldom made history.
