Jewish History in America
The motto on the Great Seal of the United States is "novus ordo seclorum"--a new order of the ages. The revolutionary nature of America was particularly true for Jews. For thousands of years they had lived in states in Europe and the Arab countries in which anti-Semitism was actively promoted or tacitly encouraged by the political authorities. Life in America, by contrast, was remarkable for the relative absence of official anti-Semitism. Here there were neither powerful anti-Semitic political parties or officially sanctioned barriers to the social and economic advancement of Jews, and the local and national governments protected the property and lives of Jews. As Washington noted in his famous letter of 1790 to the Newport, Rhode Island, synagogue, the policy of the United States was neither to sanction bigotry nor to assist persecution. "The children of the stock of Abraham" and Christians will "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities and citizenship." In this land where freedom was code, defining Jewish identity is the great theme. While America was not the Promised Land, to Jews it was the land of promise, and for every Jew who settled in Palestine between 1880-1920, at least forty immigrated to
It certainly is not coincidental that the two major terms used to describe the nature of American nationality were coined by Jews struggling over the nature of Jewish identity in this new land--Israel Zangwill's "the melting pot" and Horace Kallen's "cultural pluralism. American Jews thus have never been more American than when pondering the relationship between their American and Jewishness identities and in seeking answers to the question what does it mean to be an American Jew. " This unprecedented freedom to be different, not only from Gentiles but also from other Jews, resulted in the appearance of a plethora of new expressions of Jewish identity, and this has continued to the present day. The elevated position of Jews in America partially stems from the respect Americans have for religion and religious liberty. No version of Jewish identity has lacked for advocates in America. A hundred and sixty years ago the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of this fascinating new American society "which comprises all the nations of the world--English, French, German: people differing from one another in language, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a society possessing no roots, no memories, no prejudices, no routine, no common ideas, no national character, yet with a happiness a hundred times greater than our own. Seltzer has written, Jews "have been remarkably free to decide what of their heritage to conserve, reform, and reconstruct. There is no confusion over the fact that Irish-Catholics are Irish by ethnicity and Catholic by religion. Not surprisingly, it was a Jew (Irving Berlin) who composed "God Bless America" and another Jew (Emma Lazarus) who wrote "The New Colossus," the sonnet placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty that proclaimed America to be a refuge for the "huddled masses yearning to be free. Therefore the Jewish theme in this country is not anti-Semitism, rather 'unraveling Jewishness,' understanding their own identity.
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Acceptance Essays
