The Spirit of '76: A Jewish Perspective on the American Revolution

Michael Hoberman on Adam Jortner's A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom

Numbers are less compelling than stories as points of historical departure, but here is an exception: by the end of the American Revolution, 1000 Jews (out of a total population of approximately 2500 in North America) were living in or had just moved to Philadelphia. In A Promised Land, Adam Jortner argues that the number is the story.

As the American Revolution dragged on, Jews grew to be disproportionately supportive of the rebellion, and, by 1783, Philadelphia was “the last place standing”—the single remaining patriot stronghold in the battle to liberate the continent from British control. “American Judaism,” Jortner writes, “owes its origin to the revolution: the Patriot Jews worked and lived together in a single community, founded a synagogue, then returned home and remade their own synagogues in the image if Mikveh Israel.” North American Jews realized that voting with their feet in favor of the new nation was their most promising bet. To gain their rights, they chose sides and participated actively in a war effort whose conclusion was by no means guaranteed and whose implications they couldn’t yet anticipate. The “Patriot Jews,” as Jortner refers to them, acted smartly in moving to Philadelphia and developing its synagogue. While they may have had a hunch that a newly fashioned, anti-monarchical nation-state might be their ticket to freedom and prosperity, however, and they couldn’t have known that their actions would, in the long run, also help to prevent the establishment of Christianity as the nation’s official religion. By describing the depth of these Jews’ investment in the Revolutionary cause, A Promised Land refutes the arguments that Christian nationalists have been promulgating for generations.           

From a Jewish perspective, what was “exceptional” about the American Revolution wasn’t so much its resulting creation of a single republic but the immediate opportunity it provided for action. The war represented a tear in the fabric of imperial policy and territoriality. The Jews, like many of the gentiles among whom they had settled, saw that opening and, before any accounts were settled, decided to demand rights that they had never possessed in the past. They were lucky that the cause they joined, owing in large part to the Founders’ mixed views on religion, was sufficiently expansive to welcome, or at least not shun, their involvement. By the same token, they might just as easily have failed to cash in on their luck had they not insisted that their actions in support of the war constituted a basis for citizenship. Rights did not “flow” to anyone. They had to be seized and insisted upon. As Jortner puts it, “Jews became citizens because they chose to,” not because other Americans were in a good mood and, out of the kindness of their newly democratic hearts, decided to confer rights that weren’t theirs to confer in the first place. Scholars have long since discredited American exceptionalism as an explanatory basis for credible historical analyses. The author of A Promised Land never once invokes the concept because he isn’t quite arguing for it. Nonetheless, the question begs asking: how and why does the American Revolution matter, from a Jewish perspective?

If the establishment of the United States brought about an improvement of Jewish life in the Western Hemisphere—and it certainly seems to have done so—how can we avoid concluding that the Jews who happened to live within its territory were the contributors to and the beneficiaries of an exceptional situation? The truth is, they had more in common with Jews who lived in Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America than they did with their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. That is, until the war broke out in 1775, when suddenly, thanks to their contributions to the creation of a new republic, they no longer did.  

Over the last thirty years or so, historians of the Jewish experience in the Americas have enthusiastically joined in the larger effort to demystify British North America and reintegrate it into the larger framework of the Atlantic World. They have reminded us that the islands of the Caribbean hosted larger—and older—Jewish populations than any of the relatively tiny settlements in British North America did. They have shown us that Jews moved back and forth from the islands to the mainland, that they maintained their ties to cities like Amsterdam and London, and that they shaped their commercial and religious lives around their distant, as well as their nearby, affiliations. During the colonial era, Jews in the Americas couldn’t be encompassed or explained by their local surroundings any more than members of other population groups could be. Like other groups of European origin, they had long memories and large families that kept them in contact with people back home. They were both constrained and liberated by their need to forge a new identity on the western shore of the Atlantic, in a diaspora that exposed them to other Jews whom they never would have known in Europe, not to mention a host of Christian whites, Blacks, and Native Americans.

Jewish life in the New World was profoundly transnational. The North American settlements in which a handful of colonial-era Jews chose to live, places like New York, Newport, and Charleston, would never have come to be had it not been for their proximity to and commerce with the ports of the Caribbean, the metropolises of northwestern Europe, and the slave markets of West Africa. The new, integrative approach to Jewish American history reminds us that Jews were players in a dynamic and modernizing world economy that transcended borders and cultures. It also enables us to see that Judaism was far from hermetic, but, on the contrary, fashioned itself in the image of its exposures.

Jortner does the necessary work of situating North American Jewry within the wider framework of Atlantic World history. Among other sub-topics, his book tells the story of the Sephardic conversos who found niches within the emergent Protestant colonial and commercial enterprises in places like Dutch Brazil and English Barbados. His retelling of colonial-era Jewish history is both useful and compelling, and it avoids the pitfalls of mythology and fixations with North America that have so frequently tripped up Jewish American historians. Yes, the story of the fabled “twenty-three” Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1654 matters, but, as Jortner freely acknowledges, in the middle of the seventeenth century (and, arguably, a hundred years later as well), “the real center of Jewish life in the Americas was the Caribbean.” In the bigger picture, the 1654 story was a mere blip, an account that would only gain meaning hundreds of years later when New York became a capital of the Jewish world and the United States had evolved into the home of half the world’s Jews. The story of the “Patriot Jews,” Jortner makes clear, only makes sense within the larger context of hemispheric, as opposed to national history. Like most of the other European migrants who made their way across the Atlantic, the Jews who settled within the territories that became the United States had not gone there to fulfill an abstract destiny, manifest or otherwise; they saw economic opportunities and acted in accordance with their immediate needs. Concepts that our imposition of present-day standards cause us to apply teleologically as sources of inspiration for their collective yearning, such as religious freedom and political enfranchisement, would have exceeded their imaginations’ capacity.   

Adam Jortner, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, The American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom. Oxford University Press, 2024. pp.344. $35 (hardcover)

Nonetheless, a book whose title is A Promised Land can’t help but deliver a sort of counter-message in which North America not only matters, but somehow transcends its seeming parochialism. One of the more curious and telling hints in this regard occurs in the book’s second chapter, which, in recounting the story of how Jews first came to the Americas, briefly alludes to the story of New Mexico’s fabled Sephardic history. Like the historians who precede him, Jortner begins his account of New World Jewry with the Inquisition and explains how even conversion to Catholicism wasn’t enough to protect people of Jewish lineage from being singled out and persecuted on the basis of their “racial” origins or, to reference the Spanish terminology, the “impurity” of their blood. Despite the enormous lengths to which Spanish authorities went to bring the Inquisition to bear in its New World colonies, a significant number of people of Jewish descent (and, in some cases, actual affiliation) managed to make their way across the ocean, not only into the heart of the empire in Mexico City but to its periphery in “the lands of the Apache and Comanche.” Telling the New Mexico story, which continues to tantalize the imagination,  absorb the attention of geneticists, and frustrate attempts at corroboration, is one way of calling special attention to the importance of the North American angle: Santa Fe’s Jews, if that’s what they were, preceded New Amsterdam’s Jews by several years. Though they had no idea of their distinguishing importance within the larger scheme of things, they arrived in the place that would eventually become a part of the Promised Land before any other Jews did. Their version of crypto-Judaism, owing to its absorption into the uniquely syncretic mixture of Spanish, Native American, and Anglo cultures in which it took root, is a fascinating reminder of the multiple “routes” that Judaic culture followed in its journey to the Americas. These denizens of the Southwest may or may not have been the first people of Jewish origin to inhabit the lands of what would eventually become the United States, but it was their counterparts in the British colonies of the Atlantic Coast who, within a few generations, would become the Patriot Jews who are the subject of Jortner’s study.

Where a preponderance of books about the American Revolution typically devote significant attention on the causes of the war, A Promised Land doesn’t try to make the impossible case that North American Jews saw the revolution coming or sought, much less contributed, to its outbreak. Instead, it argues, the Jews who lived in the British colonies took sides when they needed to. Like other would-be Americans, they contributed by serving in the Continental Army (or its affiliated militias), putting their economic resources to work for the cause of independence, and, in several instances, avoiding associations with the Loyalist cause either by refusing their allegiance to it or by moving to places (like Philadelphia) where it couldn’t demand anything of them. The Patriot Jews saw an opportunity to remake their lives and embraced it.

That the rebellion was successful and that Jews achieved rights that their Caribbean or Canadian counterparts would not gain for decades to come is almost beside the point. What is remarkable about this story and about Jortner’s claim is that it highlights Jewish agency in the conflict. Remarkably, A Promised Land is the first dedicated study of Jewish participation in the American Revolution to emerge since the bicentennial of the 1970s, and it is the only such book that articulates a sophisticated and evidence-based historical argument. Jortner repeats and supports his central claim enough times to make it stick: it was the activism and agency of North American Jews—not their aspirations, or their ideologies, much less the sympathies of non-Jews—that yielded results.

Some of the stories that the book tells are familiar ones, at least to those of us whose Hebrew school days coincided with the bicentennial. We hear, for instance, about Haym Salomon, whose financial generosity and fervor for American independence inspired several “loans” to the Continental Congress that, as Salomon himself had to have known, were really gifts. Lesser-known stories include that of Frances Hart Sheftall, whose husband and son, both serving under arms in the American army, were captured and held as prisoners of war by the British in the Battle of Savannah (in 1779). For her part, Frances Sheftall survived the sieges of both Savannah and Charleston, during the latter of which, as she described it, “the balls flew like haile” and smallpox raged through the small Jewish community that had taken shelter there. Generations of American history-minded Jews have heard the story of Gershom Mendes Seixas, the hazzan of New York’s Shearith Israel, whose reluctance to pronounce an oath of loyalty to the Crown inspired him to flee New York on the eve of its invasion in August 1776 by the British, carrying one of the congregation’s Torahs with him. Jortner fills in the details of Seixas’ exploits. He follows “the patriot rabbi” to Norwalk, Connecticut, where several other New York Jews had also fled in order to avoid the British (and where they, like Frances Sheftall, would barely make it through a raging battle that took place, as one of them noted, on Tisha B’Av in 1779).

These and many of the other stories Jortner tells can be found in other sources on the Jewish experience of the war, but the historian’s readiness to explain why many of the narratives arrive at the same conclusion is what sets his study apart from the rest. Where did Seixas go after he left Norwalk? Philadelphia, where he served as the hazzan of Mikveh Israel until he returned to post-war New York in 1784. Where did Frances Sheftall’s husband and son go once they were freed from their prison ship in Savannah? Philadelphia. Where did the “American Judaism” that many of us have taken for granted for generations originate? Philadelphia. The Jews’ collective migration to that one city by the war’s conclusion was not accidental. It reflected the striking consensus that many of them had reached, which was that they had less to lose by taking a chance in favor of the newly forming nation than they did in defense of a status quo that, while it hadn’t been miserable, offered far fewer opportunities for them to speak and act in their collective best interest.

This is not to say that a significant number of North American Jews didn’t defend that status quo and act as Loyalists, particularly in places like New York, where the British seized control early and retained it until the war’s conclusion. Jews were no different from anyone else in this respect, and Jortner’s book relays the stories of several Jewish Tories faithfully. In a certain sense, Toryism—the assumption that one was better off trying to defend or maintain the rights one already possessed under imperial authority—was the surrounding sea that American patriotism swam in. It was the mentality that had governed Jewish existence throughout the New World since the mid-seventeenth century, and it had, and would continue to serve many of them well enough.

In the broader perspective, after all, we can always ask the question: are American Jews freer or better off than Canadian Jews? Just because the answer to that question today may be “no,” however, doesn’t mean that the American Revolution didn’t have a profound and transformational effect on Jewish life. If nothing else, the revolution mattered because it was outlet and an opportunity for assertive behavior, which, to all appearances, has formed the basis of Jewish demeanor in the United States for centuries.

What the patriot Jews did by participating in the war effort and then, once it was over, invoking that participation as a basis for their rights and citizenship, was unprecedented. It helped to shape legislation, contributed meaningfully to the formal disestablishment of religion in the new nation, and served as a model, or at least as a point of inspiration, for Jewish action throughout the modern world—in France in the 1780s and 1790s, in England shortly afterward, and, for that matter, in the corners of the New World that hadn’t rebelled against George III or the other imperial states of Europe. As the primitive strain of thought embodied by “replacement theory” threatens to shape the national discourse and “immigrants” are once again targeted for persecution, books like A Promised Land remind us that the culturally hermetic world that ideologues wish to “take back” never existed in the first place.

Whether or not the patriot Jews were welcomed with open arms by the familiar historical heroes who made the Revolution is very much beside the point. The new nation that early American Jews helped to create wasn’t the fulfillment of a preexisting ideal or a club that people had to be invited into. Rather, it was—and remains—a work in progress whose integrity is always a function of participatory acts. The legacy of Jortner’s Patriot Jews bears remembering in the present: gratitude for the gift of freedom can only be reified and earned through assertive will.   

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Michael Hoberman is a professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University and the author of New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America, A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, and Imagining Early American Jews (Oxford, 2025). He is currently writing a book about Theodore Seixas Solomons, the Jewish conservationist and founder of California's John Muir Trail.