Meir Y. Soloveichik, "The Jews of the American Revolution" and My Article " A Question for Rabbi Meir Soloveichik: Who Was Moses Lindo?"
David Shasha
The Jews of the American Revolution
By: Meir Y. Soloveichik
New Yorkers strolling through Chinatown in downtown Manhattan last Sunday might have noticed an unusual flurry of activity: Jewish men and women, a rabbi in a clerical gown, and a color guard gathering in graveyard tucked away behind a wrought-iron fence. Members of the New York synagogue Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America, were visiting their historic cemetery at Chatham Square.
In an annual ritual ahead of Memorial Day, they were there for a ceremony that few other synagogues in America could perform: honoring the members of their congregation who had fought in the Revolutionary War.
For Shearith Israel, where I am the rabbi, what is most striking is not that its history stretches back to the Colonial period, but rather that so many of its congregants sided with George Washington against England. New York was known as a Tory stronghold: When English forces expelled Washington’s troops from the city, King George III’s soldiers were greeted with a “Declaration of Dependence” signed by hundreds of New Yorkers, declaring their allegiance to Great Britain.
The Jews of New York, by contrast, were largely of the patriot persuasion, in part because Shearith Israel’s spiritual leader, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was known for his vocal support for the Colonists’ cause. Like many members of the Continental Congress, even Seixas had hoped for reconciliation with England. As late as May 1776, Seixas gathered his flock in the synagogue, located then on what is now South William Street, to pray that the English would “turn away their fierce Wrath from against North America.”
The prayer was unanswered, and when independence was declared, Shearith Israel’s members, according to one congregational account, decided “that it were better that the congregation should die in the cause of liberty than to live and submit to the impositions of an arrogant government.” The synagogue was abandoned, the Torah scrolls spirited out of the city by Seixas, and the congregation fled, across the empty plains of Harlem and Washington Heights, ultimately decamping to Philadelphia for the duration of the war. Many congregants enlisted in the Colonial Army.
It is now my privilege to lead the annual graveside service for those who served in the Revolution—there are about 20 of them buried in this cemetery. When we plant American flags on the graves, I try to make sure that I, or one of my sons, attend to the grave of Jonas Phillips, one of my heroes.
Phillips, cited by Stanford Law School’s Michael McConnell as one of the first religious-liberty activists of the new republic, lived an “only in America life.” He arrived in South Carolina in 1756 as the impoverished, indentured servant of another Jew. Quickly earning his freedom, Phillips moved to New York and married a member of Shearith Israel. After the congregation fled to Philadelphia, Phillips served in Col. William Bradford’s militia during the Revolution and ultimately became one of the wealthiest and most prominent Jews in America, and an acquaintance of several Founding Fathers.
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia of 1787, Phillips wrote to George Washington, its president, complaining that in Pennsylvania professing Jews were unable to serve in the state legislature because they wouldn’t acknowledge the New Testament to have been written by divine inspiration. “The Jews,” Phillips wrote to Washington, “have been true and faithful whigs, and during the late Contest with England they have been foremost in aiding and assisting the States with their lifes and fortunes, they have supported the Cause, have bravely faught and bleed for liberty which they Can not Enjoy.”
The convention produced a constitution that banned all religious tests for national office. It is fitting, therefore, that the first Jew to receive a federal appointment in America was Jonas Phillips’s grandson, Mordecai Manuel Noah, President Madison’s ambassador to Tunis. His portrait still hangs at the entrance of Shearith Israel.
At the ceremony in advance of Memorial Day, we honor only the patriot Jews who served, but I also find fascinating the histories of some of those who didn’t fight for the American cause and remained in New York. Their families’ stories, each in its own way, speak of America’s promise.
One example is Samuel Lazarus, who wanted to get married in New York during the war but needed a clergyman to perform the wedding. Gershom Mendes Seixas, at risk to his life, snuck into the city to officiate. The marriage performed by Seixas produced a descendant by the name of Emma Lazarus, whose poem welcoming immigrants adorns the Statue of Liberty.
For many Americans, Memorial Day obligates us once a year to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation. Yet for Jews, memory, bridging the gap between past and present, is a constant duty. The renowned 20th-century Talmudist Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik once wrote that for Jews, “bygones turn into facts, pale memories into living experiences and archaeological history into a vibrant reality.”
I am reminded of this every spring, when, in a small cemetery in downtown Manhattan, patriotic Jews, buried for centuries, are given the chance to live again.
Mr. Soloveichik is the rabbi and minister of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan and director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought of Yeshiva University.
From The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2016
A Question for Rabbi Meir Soloveichik: Who Was Moses Lindo?
Before I begin to discuss Rabbi Meir Soloveichik’s self-serving and misleading Wall Street Journal article “The Jews of the American Revolution,” it must be said clearly and honestly that the “Idiot Sephardim” deserve whatever they get from the Ashkenazim they hire as employees.
Sephardic history in America has become largely a closed book, and the fact that many Ashkenazim are now running our institutions does not help things any.
We have seen that the recent PBS documentary “The Jewish Journey: America” spent less than a minute on the Western Sephardim, who were effectively the first Jews in America, at the very beginning of the film:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/pbs/davidshasha/0YE5suTvNtc/uKe-ZgWuIJUJ
We will also note the outsize role of historian Jonathan Sarna who has continued to minimize the Sephardic contribution to American Jewish History:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/sarna/davidshasha/Dy3LfHJHKHg/_3bSJd-nAQAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/sarna/davidshasha/EmYNqD4sZ1A/yuY34TnEQNcJ
There is also the case of Sarna’s disciple Zev Eleff:
But more than any of this is the malignant role played by Rabbi Marc Angel, Rabbi Soloveichik’s predecessor at Shearith Israel, in the ongoing erasure of the Sephardic heritage in America:
Rabbi Angel’s staunch commitment, as is the case with Rabbi Soloveichik as well as Sarna and Eleff, to the values of Yeshiva University and the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox system is absolute and inviolable.
We recently saw a shocking article in which Rabbi Angel rejected Convivencia, the most basic element of the classical Sephardic heritage:
Many Self-Hating Sephardim attacked my article on Rabbi Angel and vociferously supported his blatant misreading and insane pro-Catholic distortions of Sephardic history, as David Ramirez wrote in his excellent article “Convivencia Under Siege”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/g1NBZuT1i-M
So when we approach “The Jews of the American Revolution” article we must keep in mind just how low the Sephardic tradition has sunk these days.
The first thing that we notice is how the word “Sephardic” never once appears in the article.
And, as is also usual, the sacred values of Sephardic Jewish Humanism are completely ignored.
When we seek to learn about the early history of American Jews it is necessary to turn to the two seminal books of Rabbi David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone (1952) and An Old Faith in the New World (1955), neither of which has been in print for many years:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Portraits_Etched_in_Stone.html?id=-j0OAQAAIAAJ
https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Old_Faith_in_the_New_World.html?id=P6YaAAAAIAAJ
I would like to cite an important passage in the final chapter of An Old Faith in the New World entitled “The Past is Everlasting,” which provides a very stark contrast to the Soloveichik article:
In the year 1654, the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers came possessed of the basic heritage of the Bible and Talmud and the later treasury of the Golden Age of Spain. The appellation Sephardi is derived from the name Sepharad. Whatever place or people this may have designated when the prophet Obadiah mentioned it, later tradition has regarded Sepharad as the Hebrew name for Spain. The first scattered beginnings of the settlement of the Jews in Spain may possibly antedate the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem nearly nineteen centuries ago. Travel, far-reaching overseas trade, maritime exploration, and a spirit of adventure possessed the Hebrew people at a very early time. In Biblical days there were “those who go down to the sea in ships,” and whom trade took to the utter end of the European world, to Tarshish, often identified with Tartessus in ancient Spain. In the first century of the common era, the Jewish diaspora was widespread in lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
In Visigothic Spain the lot of Jews was often not a happy one. But with the conquest by the Arabs in 711 their lot improved. Although the relations between Moslem and Jew were not uniformly a blissful fellowship, there arose beyond the conflicts in both Moslem and Christian Spain an era of epoch-making intellectual interplay and spiritual collaboration which flowered into the Jewish Golden Age of medieval Spain. This linked faith and reason, religion and science. To the world it brought a juncture between East and West. It saw the rise of a spiritually-aspiring neo-Platonist philosopher such as the eleventh-century Solomon ibn Gabirol, who also wrote inspiring hymns and poem and whom the Christian world quoted under the name of Avicebron, and it witnessed the phenomenon of the gigantic intellect of Moses Maimonides whose Guide to the Perplexed still opens up for many modern minds a revealing vision of a transcendent faith that is at one with man’s most rational thinking. It was an age which gave birth to the twelfth-century physician and philosopher Judah Halevi. It was a time that witnessed the activity of the tenth-century Hasdai ibn Shaprut (915-961), Samuel Hanagid (993-1055), Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), and other Jewish viziers and statesmen who served their country with ability and devotion. From that intellectual soil sprang Jewish geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, and astronomers, whose work helped make possible the daring expedition of Columbus. (pp. 487-488)
The Sephardic heritage of Religious Humanism is brilliantly resplendent in the wise words of Rabbi De Sola Pool; a man who was one of the last authentic expositors of this noble tradition.
Compare De Sola Pool’s closing thoughts with those of Soloveichik:
For many Americans, Memorial Day obligates us once a year to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation. Yet for Jews, memory, bridging the gap between past and present, is a constant duty. The renowned 20th-century Talmudist Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik once wrote that for Jews, “bygones turn into facts, pale memories into living experiences and archaeological history into a vibrant reality.”
It is quite telling that Soloveichik, who makes no reference to the classical Sephardic heritage in the article, sums up his discussion of American Jews with the ubiquitous figure of his relative Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the scion of a family of Eastern European rabbis whose thinking was very different from that of Sephardic Jewish Humanism.
Unlike the Ashkenazim, Sephardim never had to “bridge” the gap between past and present because we have maintained our heritage and do not see the present world as alien in any way.
Sephardim do not see themselves as removed from the Gentile world, and resolutely do not see Judaism as a thing completely separate from general civilization; an integrative process that has led Ashkenazim to see us as “Inauthentic Jews,” as I have written in an article where I cite many classical Ashkenazi rabbinic authorities who strongly rejected the Sephardic synthesis:
This conflicted understanding of what Judaism is and how it is understood continues to divide Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.
With this in mind, I was very much struck by the following part of the Soloveichik article:
It is now my privilege to lead the annual graveside service for those who served in the Revolution—there are about 20 of them buried in this cemetery. When we plant American flags on the graves, I try to make sure that I, or one of my sons, attend to the grave of Jonas Phillips, one of my heroes.
Jonas Phillips is indeed one of the most outstanding figures of 18th century Jewish life in America, and is memorably discussed by De Sola Pool in Portraits Etched in Stone:
He was one of the most if not the most active members of that reorganized Philadelphia congregation. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah he would chant the haftara, the prophetic reading, and on the second day the early morning Psalms, zemiroth. On the Day of Atonement it was he of the name of Jonas who would read the Book of Jonah, the reading from the prophets on the afternoon of that day, and on Hoshaana Rabbah he would read the Selihoth, the most important part of the service. (p. 296)
De Sola Pool takes it for granted that his reader will know that Phillips had adapted to the Sephardic nusah, way of praying, that is an essential part of our Synagogues, then as now. Phillips was the very epitome of a Jewish Humanist as he combined service to humanity with a devout religiosity.
It is critical to make note of the fact that Phillips composed a letter demanding religious liberty that he sent to George Washington in 1787, just a few years before the more famous letter of Moses Seixas:
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0291
Here is the full text of this extraordinary letter:
From Jonas Phillips
Philadelphia 24th Ellul 5547 or Sepr 7th 1787
Sirs
With leave and Submission I address my Self To those in whome there is wisdom understanding and knowledge. they are the honorable personages appointed and Made overseers of a part of the terrestrial globe of the Earth, Namely the 13 united states of america in Convention Assembled, the Lord preserve them amen.
I the subscriber being one of the people called Jews of the City of Philadelphia, a people scattered and despersed among all nations do behold with Concern that among the laws in the Constitution of Pennsylvania their is a Clause Sect 10 to viz.—I do belive in one God the Creator and governour of the universe the Rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked—and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the old and New testement to be given by devine inspiration—To Swear and belive that the new testement was given by devine inspiration is absolutly against the Religious principle of a Jew and is against his conscience to take any such oath. By the above law a Jew is deprived of holding any public office or place of Government which is a Contradectory to the bill of Right Sect. 2 viz.—1
That all men have a natural and inalienable Right To worship almighty God according to the dictates of their own Conscience and understanding, and that no man aught or of Right can be compelled to attend any Religious Worship or Erect or support any place of worship or Maintain any minister contrary to or against his own free will and Consent nor can any man who acknowledges the being of a God be Justly deprived or abridged of any Civil Right as a Citizen on account of his Religious Sentiments or peculiar mode of Religious Worship and that no authority can or aught to be vested in or assumed by any power what Ever that shall in any Case interfere or in any manner Controul the Right of Conscince in the free Exercise of Religious Worship.
It is well Known among all the Citizens of the 13 united states that the Jews have been true and faithfull whigs; and during the late contest with England they have been foremost in aiding and assisting the states with their lifes and fortunes, they have supported the cause, have bravely fought and bleed for Liberty which they can not Enjoy.
Therefore if the honourable Convention shall in their Wisdom think fit and alter the said oath and leave out the words to viz.—and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the new testement to be given by devine inspiration, then the Israelites will think themself happy to live under a government where all Religious societys are on an Eaquel footing. I solecet this favour for my Self my Children and posterity and for the benefit of all the Israelites through the 13 united States of america.
My prayer is unto the Lord—May the people of this states Rise up as a great and young lion, May they prevail against their Enemies, May the degrees of honour of his Exceellency the president of the Convention George Washington, be ⟨Extolled⟩ and Raise up, May Everyone speak of his glorious Exploits—May God prolong his days among us in this land of Liberty—May he lead the armies against his Enemys as he has done hereuntofore, May God Extend peace unto the united States—May they get up to the highest Prosperitys—May God Extend peace to them and their Seed after them so long as the Sun and moon Endureth—and May the almighty God of our father Abraham Isaac and Jacob endue this Noble Assembly with wisdom Judgement and unamity in their Councills, and may they have the Satisfaction to see that their present toil and labour for the wellfair of the united States may be approved of Through all the world and perticular by the united States of america, is the ardent prayer of Sires Your Most devoted obed. Servant
Jonas Phillips
And here is the full text of Moses Seixas’ far more famous 1790 letter to that very same George Washington:
Sir,
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits — and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.
With pleasure we reflect on those days — those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, — shielded Your head in the day of battle: — and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: — deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: — This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.
For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men — beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: — And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.
Done and Signed by
order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island
Moses Seixas, Warden
August 17th 1790
The two letters are mirror-images of each other; the basic premise of both missives is that all Americans should be free to practice their religious traditions without prejudice.
In order to better understand who Jonas Phillips was it is necessary to return to De Sola Pool’s entry in Portraits Etched in Stone:
Jonas Phillips was twenty-one years old when in November, 1756, he arrived at Charles Town, S.C., in the Charming Nancy. He came, as so many of the settlers in those days, as an indentured servant. In London, three months before the sailing of the ship, Moses Lindo had engaged Jonas Phillips in his service “to come with him to this province.” (p. 291)
Moses Lindo was a prominent Sephardi living in London who chose to make the trans-Atlantic trip and eventually made a big name for himself in South Carolina.
Here is Lindo’s biography, written by Cyrus Adler and Leon Huhner, from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9998-lindo-moses
Planter and merchant in South Carolina; born probably in England; died at Charleston, S. C., April 26, 1774. He seems to have been considered one of the foremost experts in the cochineal and indigo trade in London. Becoming interested in the prospects of the indigo industry of South Carolina, he removed to Charleston in Nov., 1756, and at once announced his intention of purchasing indigo for the foreign market. His advertisements appear repeatedly in the "South Carolina Gazette" for 1756. He soon became a wealthy planter and slave-owner and ranked among the prominent merchants of Charleston. He did more than any other individual to encourage and advance the indigo industry of the colony, among the most important industries in South Carolina in prerevolutionary times. His transactions were enormous, and in 1762 he was appointed "Surveyor and Inspector-General of Indigo, Drugs, and Dyes," an office he resigned in 1772.
Lindo seems to have been a man of scientific attainments, and his experiments with American dyes commenced as early as 1757. He maintained a correspondence with Emanuel Mendez da Costa, librarian of the Royal Society and one of the foremost naturalists of his day. The "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" (liii. 238, paper 37) contains "An account of a New Die from the Berries of a Weed in South Carolina: in a letter from Mr. Moses Lindo dated at Charlestown, September 2, 1763, to Mr. Emanuel Mendez da Costa, Librarian of the Royal Society."
An item in the "South Carolina Gazette" (March 15, 1773) states that Lindo purchased a stone which he believed to be a topaz of immense size, and that he sent it to London by the Right Hon. Lord Charles Greville Montague to be presented to the Queen of England. A number of Lindo's advertisements and of items concerning him in the "South Carolina Gazette" have recently been collected by Rev. B. A. Elzas, and reprinted in the "Charleston News and Courier," Jan. 18, 1903.
But this brief biography neglects to mention the Lindo family history in England. For that we must turn to James Picciotto’s excellent 1875 book Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Sketches_of_Anglo_Jewish_History.html?id=GFZvqbHo4a0C
The book was republished in 1956 by the Soncino Press:
http://www.amazon.com/Sketches-Anglo-Jewish-History-Prologue-Finestein/dp/B007GA5D5Y
Here is the relevant passage on Moses Lindo:
In 1805 we find a prosecution was ordered against the printer of the St James’ Chronicle for the publication of some offensive letters against the Jews, signed ‘Catharticus.’ An apology, though somewhat tardy, was obtained, and the matter terminated.
It was at this time that the Committee of Deputies began to acquire greater development and importance. The Portuguese themselves saw the necessity of placing the institution on a broader basis; and the following letter was forwarded to the principal German Congregations in Great Britain:
“We, the undersigned, appointed by the elders of our Portuguese Jew nation by the appellation of Deputados, for the purpose of watching all Acts of Parliament, Acts of Government, laws, libels, addresses, or whatever else may affect the body of Jews, are desirous of acting with complete unison in all public concerns, therefore deem it necessary to assume the liberty of soliciting that your congregation in concert with the others will be pleased to appoint such gentlemen as you may think proper under the same denomination, that we may request their attendance at occasion requires, and have the pleasure in joining in all transactions that may concern us as one body. Should you think proper to comply with our recommendation, we beg you will transmit us the names of the gentlemen so appointed.”
-Signed R. Brandon, N. Basevi, Moses Lindo, jun., Jacob Osorio, Moses Mocatta, and Jacob Mocatta. (Soncino 1956 edition, pp. 116-117)
This fascinating letter from the first years of the 19th century echoes the concern for religious liberty that animates both the Jonas Phillips and Moses Seixas letters to George Washington!
Here is a brief history of the Lindo family from a JTA article published in 1933:
The two Moses Lindos are likely father and son, as explained in a 1903 article from the Charleston News and Courier by Dr. Barnett Elzas cited in the Jewish Encyclopedia entry:
http://www.archive.org/stream/moseslindosketch00elzaiala/moseslindosketch00elzaiala_djvu.txt
Here is the relevant passage:
I have as yet made no attempt to trace him in London. I shall do so later and I am satisfied that I shall have no difficulty in finding out something more about him. I am personally acquainted with several members of the Lindo family in London, which has been notably connected with the Spanish and Portuguese community of that city for several generations. Picciotto in his charming "Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History," (p. 124,) makes mention of a Moses Lindo, Jr, as a prominent member of the "Deputies of British Jews," a body appointed "To watch all Acts of Parliament, Acts of Government, laws, libels, addresses, or whatever else may affect the body of Jews," and which is to-day the most influential organization of Jews in the world. He may be a son of our Moses Lindo. The latter was himself an important personage in London prior to his coming to South Carolina.
Was it possible that Phillips, as the indentured servant of Moses Lindo, Sr., imbibed his sense of civic duty from the Jewish Humanism that was so central to the classical Sephardic heritage?
Phillips married Rebecca Machado, daughter of David Mendes Machado, in 1762 and, as De Sola Pool notes, had 21 children, one of whom, Zipporah, married Manuel Noah, who became the parents of the famous Mordechai Manuel Noah. It has been said that George Washington himself attended the nuptials!
So the “conversion” of the Ashkenazi Phillips to the ways of the Sephardim was, it would seem, not limited to his reading of the Synagogue liturgy.
Indeed, the common culture of Jews in early American history was rooted in the Religious Humanism of old Spain and Portugal; a “Mediterranean Society” that was very different from the closed world of the Eastern European Shtetls and the persecutions of Christian Europe with its Ghettos and Crusades.
The Iberian Convivencia that is being denied by many, under the rubric of a Zionist anathema against the Arab-Muslim world, was very much a formative part of the early American Jewish experience that can be traced from Gershom Mendes Seixas to Moses Lindo to Jonas Phillips; all figures connected to this vital Sephardic heritage that is never once mentioned by Meir Soloveichik is his pusillanimous Wall Street Journal article.
We now live in a time when the Sephardic heritage of Religious Humanism has become a dead letter in the Jewish community. Reactionary figures like Meir Soloveichik represent a very different brand of Judaism that is rooted in Neo-Conservative values closer to the current iteration of the Republican Party than to the liberal world of Jonas Phillips:
Soloveichik’s outspoken devotion to the legacy of the odious Menachem Begin has been a consistent feature of his career for many years:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/menachem-begins-zionist-legacy/article/821712
This past January we were informed that he was chosen by Senator Marco Rubio to serve on his “Religious Liberty Advisory Board”:
His role in Congregation Shearith Israel has little if anything to do with the Sephardic heritage, and more to do with the failure of that heritage to strike roots in today’s Jewish community.
Since being hired by SI in 2012 Soloveichik has never used his pulpit to speak of the Sephardic heritage, or how our community played a central role in American Jewish history.
His article “The Jews of the American Revolution” makes tendentious use of a recent photo-op at the Chatham Square Cemetery in a way that looks to reassure American Gentiles that the current generation of Zionist Jews are still loyal to this country, even though we know that Israel has now assumed sacrosanct status in a way that leaves little room for a complex, multiple Jewish identity as understood in the Sephardic tradition.
Jonas Phillips and Moses Seixas were both Jewish Humanists whose commitment to religious liberty and American pluralism was absolute. It was the product of many centuries of Jewish acculturation in a Sephardic tradition rooted in the values of Maimonides who saw the world of Science, God, and Humanity as One and not something that needed to be “bridged.”
I have presented the deep disdain and contempt of Ashkenazim for Religious Humanism on many occasions, and the Soloveichik article is a duplicitous attempt to falsely present the Ashkenazi Orthodox view as compatible with the traditions of old Sepharad. This is a trick that Soloveichik’s SI predecessor Marc Angel also tried to play on us, but which has never fully succeeded given the ongoing erosion of our heritage.
It is worthwhile to note that the two essential books on Shearith Israel by David de Sola Pool are currently out-of-print, having been replaced by a vacuous Coffee Table book with a brief commentary by Angel:
http://www.riversidebook.com/remnant.html
Indeed, the very rich literary resources that would allow us to learn about this heritage and not have to rely on figures like Angel and Soloveichik, who are operating under the value system and intellectual heritage of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy, are increasingly becoming inaccessible to the general reader.
Without the necessary conceptual tools in which to process the Sephardic heritage and its central place in American Jewish History, it is certain that we will continue to see our intellectual and cultural traditions be eliminated from the larger Jewish discussion; our literary heritage and ethical values subsumed under the weight of a deleterious Ashkenazi hegemony that looks to swallow up all Jewish representation.
David Shasha