Make America Jewish Again

Some will say America has never been Jewish. How can it be made Jewish again?

I say America has always been Jewish, as much as any country, with the exception of Israel. Few would agree, I suspect, but America still has a larger population of Jews than does Israel.

David Gelernter (Jewish) wrote a book called Americanism: The Fourth Abrahamic Religion. He would agree with me. Or rather, I with him.

Even Tom Paine, an atheist, argued from the Old Testament when advocating energetically for the Revolution. He cited the Books of Samuel regarding the disadvantages of a king. It was Tom Paine (not Edmund Burke) that Washington read to his troops in Valley Forge.

Now, it appears that America, or at least a considerable part of America, is intensely hostile to Jews — more so than ever in my lifetime of 76 years.

Consider that the Jews got here almost as soon as the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims arrived in 1620. The Jews arrived in 1654. Jewish merchants and bankers in Amsterdam sent Samuel Barsimson to New Amsterdam to arrange for Jewish immigrants to arrive there. Peter Stuyvesant objected, but Barsimson and his fellow Jews in Amsterdam appealed to the Dutch West Indies Company, for whom Stuyvesant worked, to allow Jews to settle there. Within a month a group of Sephardic Jews arrived from Recife, Brazil, seeking religious freedom and opportunity, just as the Pilgrims had so recently before them.

What was going on?

The story takes us back a ways. In 1497, Portugal under Manuel II issued a proclamation requiring conversion or expulsion for the Jews of Portugal. Manuel was under pressure from Ferdinand and Isabel, who had expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492 (unaware that Christopher Columbus was likely a Jew). At that time Calvinist Holland was involuntarily under the control of Catholic Spain (leading eventually to the 80 Years' War, marked by such events as the Siege of Leiden). Some of the expelled Portuguese Jews went to Amsterdam, where they were accorded more religious freedom and less discrimination. They were called the Portuguese Sephardim there, a title to distinguish them from the Ashkenazi Jews. They prospered, along with their Ashkenazi relatives (among them Samuel Barsimson). In 1630 Holland obtained control of Pernambuco, a province in Northeast Brazil which was otherwise a Portuguese colony. The capital city was Recife. For 14 years the Dutch controlled the area, getting rich off the sugar production there. Pernambuco was one of the wealthiest enclaves on the planet in those years. Some Portuguese Sephardim wound up there and prospered in the sugar trade. Recife, even today, looks like a version of Amsterdam, and the Jewish presence there in the 1600s can still be seen in the typical headgear of the cangaceiro (cowboy, that also implies a sort of outlaw status), the Pernambuco chapeu de cuero (e.g., leather hat). The headgear is essentially a Jewish Kippah made of hard leather with a wide leather brim. There is a Star of David on the front, and strips of leather hanging from the sides of the brim like Jewish payot. The hard leather was essential to protect from the typically very thorny scrub brush and trees in the Sertao of Northeast Brazil.

The expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal is considered historically a major blow to the Iberian economy and culture. The Jews expelled included many professionals, skilled tradesmen, and merchants with extensive trade networks.

In 1654, the Portuguese retook control of Pernambuco. The Jews in the area again were under the Portuguese convert-or-leave order, and so at least some left for another Dutch city, New Amsterdam. As noted above, Peter Stuyvesant wasn't happy about that and didn't treat them very well, but he couldn't stop them from arriving. His mistreatment was on the order of harassment. For example, he barred the Jews from military participation, which included standing watch. Then he fined them for not standing watch.

Within a decade (1664), Britain sent a fleet to New Amsterdam to take control of the city. Stuyvesant had no military capacity to resist and relinquished control of the city to the British. It was renamed New York. The Jews stayed.

What became of them?

Well, one descendant of those Recife Sephardic Jewish immigrants to New York was Emma Lazarus. Her father was an affluent sugar trader in New York. In the late 1800s Emma famously advocated for and assisted Jewish immigration to America. At that time (1880s) Jewish immigration was mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia. (Earlier in the century Jewish immigrants had been primarily Ashkenazis from Western Europe, many from Germany.) In 1881 Czar, Alexander II had been shockingly assassinated. Jews fearing blame and pogroms in an era of upheaval left by the millions to come to America. Between 1880 and 1920, some 3.5 million Eastern Europeans — 2.5 million Jewish — immigrated to America. This is when Ellis Island became famous, and of course, Emma Lazarus wrote the poem that later was placed on the Statue of Liberty, "The New Colossus." Russian and Eastern European Jews poured into New York. They initially wound up on the Lower East Side, the tenement district, which in 1900 was the most densely populated spot on the planet. Even a poor Irish boy growing up at the time on the Lower East Side named James Cagney spoke Yiddish. Emma Lazarus died an untimely death (apparently from Hodgkin's Lymphoma), but not before she had written the poem that was her legacy. The poem has become an iconic part of American history and has shaped the nation.

What became of the sugar industry that had so enriched Pernambuco? It gradually collapsed under British and Dutch competition from sugar production in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and Pernambuco became the most impoverished province of Brazil.

Jews, of course, immigrated to the New World all up and down the Atlantic coast of the Americas and throughout the Caribbean. Many of them were Conversos, or crypto Jews who had been forcibly assimilated to Catholicism, from Portugal and Spain. A third of the Conquistadors who accompanied Cortez on his conquest of Mexico were Conversos. Columbus is said to have preferentially selected Conversos for his voyages, and very likely was Jewish himself (another reason the pro-Palestinian protestors in New York may have wanted to tear down his statue).

Alexander Hamilton was educated in a Jewish School in the Caribbean. His mother, a French Huguenot, had married a Danish Jew, a merchant by the name of Lavine. She had a son with him (Peter) but left him. Alexander would be fathered out of wedlock to James Hamilton, a Scottish trader. He abandoned his sons (Alexander and James), and Alexander was raised reading the Torah in Hebrew in a Jewish school.

There was indeed such a thing as Huguenot Jews. These were Sephardic Jews in southern France who assimilated into Protestantism (preferable to Catholicism for them?) to avoid persecution. These Sephardis intermixed with other French Huguenots. Hence, it is quite possible that Hamilton's mother was actually a Converso or crypto-Jew. Later, as a youth, when his advocacy and other talents became clear, a collection was taken up to send him to King's College in New York. He was there a year before joining the Revolution, becoming one of Washington's top aides. Hamilton was a stalwart friend of the Jews. One might speculate that it was his influence behind Washington's famous letter to the Newport Synagogue. A Scottish father, French Huguenot (Jewish?) mother, born out of wedlock with a Jewish education. Immigrant to America. Revolutionary. Author of the Federalist Papers. Constitutionalist. Capitalist. First Secretary of the Treasury. I would think that his Jewish education, at a minimum, was integral to his success and his contributions.

What of New York? As we know, it became the financial and trade capital of the world. And a considerably Jewish city. The Jewish population of New York City in 1920 was about 1.5 million, comprising about 30% of the megatropolis's population. When Hitler came to power, he had feverish visions of fire bombing New York City because he considered it a Jewish capital. This was about the time Robert Moses started using New Deal grants to rebuild the parks and transit of NYC, transforming the Big Apple.

New York was truly an immigrant city then, comprised of a large proportion of foreign-born residents: Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans. I would say, if the 20th Century was in fact the American Century, it was then to a considerable degree the Immigrant Century. Yes, America would not be America without those immigrants who benefited the country enormously.

Consider the contributions of just a couple of Jews of Eastern European provenance: David Sarnoff and Harry Dexter White.

Sarnoff was born into a Jewish family in a small town in the Minsk oblast (now in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire). He immigrated with his family to America in 1900 at age 9. Prior to immigration, his education had been in a Yeshiva where he had memorized the Torah. In New York, he went to the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side. In 1906 his father developed tuberculosis, and the 15-year-old David had to go to work to support the family. He started out selling newspapers. By chance encounter he got a job as an office boy with the Commercial Cable Company and then wound up with a job with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America as an office boy. He spent the rest of his career in the electronic communications industry. Over 13 years he rose from office boy to the commercial manager of the company. In 1915 he conceived the idea of broadcast radio, which was ignored for the better part of a decade. Ultimately, American Marconi was purchased by General Electric and became the Radio Corporation of America. Under Owen D. Young, a broadcast company was formed that Sarnoff headed, the National Broadcasting Corporation, and Sarnoff's vision of broadcast radio came into being. He also pushed early on for developing broadcast television and further worked with other Russian Jews on developing electronic communications for military purposes. Along with Vladimir Zworykin, Simeon Eisenstein, and Isaac Shoenberg — all Russian Jews — he worked on the development of cathode ray tubes for both television and radar. In 1939 Sarnoff had the first television broadcast at the New York World's Fair, featuring a speech by FDR. Zworkyin in particular had worked on this development for a decade. He was familiar with the work of Philo T. Farnsworth and attempted to develop his idea for television. Sarnoff indeed stiffed Farnsworth on the patent for television, and even after Farnsworth had won a court settlement of $1 million, Sarnoff never paid him. Sarnoff had also manipulated stock on a level with Joseph Kennedy. But he was an incessant developer of radio and television technology. His work, along with Zworykin and the others at EMI Marconi in Britain, resumed in the development of the British radar system in the lead-up to the Battle of Britain.

Germany had been developing radar working in the centimeter wavelength range. EMI Marconi was developing radar in the 1.5-meter wavelength range. Leading up to the Battle of Britain, Germany searched for signs of radar capability by examining signals coming out of Britain, but did not find any in the wavelength range they were expecting. Further, the frequency of the British radar was 50 Hz, the same as the frequency of the electrical grid in Britain. Germany saw these signals but construed them as background from the electrical grid. So when the Battle of Britain began, Germany did not expect the Spitfires that were always there to meet them. The British attributed their success in the Battle of Britain to that radar. Even further, Sarnoff and the Russian Jews developed radar capacity that could fit in planes, which proved crucial also to the next phase of the war as the Germans began night bombing. That air intercept radar allowed the British to "see" the German bombers at night, again contributing to the successful defense of Britain. One can hardly say that this Russian Jewish immigrant, who came to America at the height of the mass migration from Eastern Europe, did not, for better or worse, transform the nation. Farnsworth famously felt that television was a useless invention until he saw the broadcast of the moon landing in 1969, and then commented that perhaps it was worth something after all.

Harry Dexter White was born in Boston to Lithuanian Jewish parents who had immigrated to the US in the 1880s. He served in WWI, and after the war sought degrees in government and economics, obtaining bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from Stanford, and a PhD from Harvard. He was hired by the Treasury Department under Henry Morgenthau and rose to become the economist in charge of international finance and relations. After the war he was the lead American negotiator at the Bretton Woods conference, where he sparred with John Maynard Keynes over the latter's desire for a new supranational currency, the "bancor." White dominated the conference. He established the Bretton Woods gold standard and created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The US dollar was then tied to the price of gold at $35 an ounce. This left the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency for the world. The result was that inflation remained low throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, until the advent of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society blowout spending for guns and butter. Before Johnson's presidency, the American economy had grown dramatically, contrary to the Keynesian economists (Samuelson) who predicted a collapse at the end of the war. Economists have criticized the Bretton Woods arrangement, but, in my view, it contributed to currency stability and economic stability — almost the only time in the 20th Century that this occurred.

For example, the Savings and Loan system was set up as part of the New Deal. S&Ls could lend at 6% and pay interest of 4%. That worked well as long as inflation was in check. My formative years were between 1950 and 1965, and for most of that time inflation was quiescent, around 1.3%. I grew up in a small town in the Nevada desert, where my father was a druggist and had a store. (He was also the instigator of the local credit union on whose board he sat — a fact that I didn't know until much later in life). I started working in the store at age 5, making 25 cents an hour. He would pay me on Fridays, and I would walk across the main street of the town and down a block (the main street was about 6 blocks long) to deposit my money (cash) in my account at the credit union. Child labor, I know. But I saved every penny I made, my salary went up little by little over the years, and by the time I left for college, I had $25,000 in my account. Quite a sum in the 1960s. The lack of inflation and stability of the economy gave me confidence in the system, bolstering my confidence in the country and providing a base of optimism for my future. My father had survived the Great Depression and had no confidence left in stock markets or the economy, but he provided a comfortable living running a small store in a small town in the hinterlands of America. It was a great base for proceeding with life for me. It took some time and craziness to disabuse me of my confidence in the American economy, which is not entirely gone. But the vicissitudes of the economy have weighed heavily on me for many years: The inflation of the late 60s and 70s; the ending of the gold standard (Bretton Woods) due to the gold drain caused by Johnson's inflationary fiscal and monetary policies; the chaos of price controls under Nixon, then the oil boycott of the mid-1970s; the S&L meltdown under Reagan/Bush, then the Dotcom bubble bursting after Alan Greenspan's long-term low interest rates in the 90s to prop up the Japanese economy; followed by the 9/11 meltdown and the 2008 real estate bust; the Obama/Biden "summer of recovery" that wasn't; Biden inflation and now Trump's tariffs.

The stability of the 1950s and early 1960s was due to a variety of things, but one of the underpinnings of that stability, in my view, was the Bretton Woods agreement. Harry Dexter White was an internationalist who passed sensitive information to the Soviet Union (he was a Communist spy), yet he gave my young self a solid system in which to grow up. I appreciate that. It took a conservative (Nixon) to end the Bretton Woods accord and give us an entirely fiat currency, with a Federal Reserve System that was poorly designed and, in my view, mostly harmful to the American and world economy. These mistakes were exacerbated by politicians who use, abuse, and damage our economic system endlessly. So this conservative has some appreciation for the actions of someone who is viewed as not having our nation's interest sufficiently at heart.

So even those Jewish immigrants — or those descended from them — who are seen as not working in the best interests of the nation have been of benefit.

More on this topic to come.