Every Hanukkah, Jews retell the story of the Maccabees, the ancient heroes of the second century BCE, who wrested Jerusalem from the tyranny of the Greek empire.
This year was no different. But as Hanukkah draws to an end, we near ever closer to the 250th birthday of the United States—which gives us reason to tell the story of another set of Jewish heroes as well: those who helped wrest the other Promised Land, America, from the tyranny of the British Empire.
Three weeks after the Declaration of Independence was signed, a man named Jonas Phillips became the proud owner of one of the 200 copies of the Declaration that had been distributed throughout the colonies. Phillips, a devout patriot and the president of a synagogue in Philadelphia, sent his copy to an acquaintance in Amsterdam on the eve of the Revolutionary War, along with a letter in Yiddish expressing strong optimism for the patriot cause. “The Americans have already made themselves like the states of Holland,” he wrote, alluding to the Dutch separatist movement against their Spanish Empire that started two centuries earlier.
Neither the Declaration nor the letter ever reached their intended recipient. Instead, they were intercepted by a British warship. Unable to read Yiddish, the British assumed the letter was a secret code smuggled by the rebels. It was, instead, an unguarded outburst of enthusiasm—a new American’s attempt to share the thrill of liberty with those he had left behind.
Phillips’s letter remains among the earliest surviving traces of Jewish commitment to the American Revolution. But his isn’t the only tale of an original American Jew that was intercepted. Too many others have been as well—if not by warships, then by time.
Most people know the story of Jews arriving at Ellis Island in the 19th century, or of refugees fleeing war-torn Europe in the 20th. But largely unknown or forgotten is the story of the first American Jews—the 23 who arrived in New Amsterdam, marking what the great historian of early American Jewry, Jonathan Sarna, refers to as “the beginning of Jewish communal life in North America.” They came in 1654, and others followed shortly thereafter. At the onset of the American Revolution, they were there to fight, and more—to help shape Jewish life in the new republic, and also the founding character of the nation itself.
Those 23 were the first community, but more Jews would arrive in the decades that followed. They came in search of greater economic opportunity or religious tolerance, from Europe, South America, and the Caribbean, fleeing pogroms and the Inquisition. They would be some of the first to settle new colonies, from Rhode Island to Georgia. Some asked for permission to arrive; others did not. By the eve of the Revolution in 1776, there were between 1,000 and 2,500 Jews living across the 13 colonies.
Phillips was among the later arrivals, landing first in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1756. Born in western Germany, he was so poor that he worked for several years in the colonies as an indentured servant—to another American Jew—to pay for his passage. After earning his freedom, he made his way north to New York, taking odd jobs before finding success as a merchant and building a family.
The Revolution would upend his life. Ahead of the British occupation of New York, Phillips and his family—along with many Jews across the colonies—made their way to Philadelphia, the patriots’ stronghold. The city’s only synagogue, Mikveh Israel, grew so crowded that its members were forced to purchase a new building to accommodate the influx. There, hundreds of displaced Jews gathered to pray for the success of the American cause.
Adam Jortner, the author of A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom, argues that what makes the journey of American Jews during the Revolution so notable is that, for the first time in many centuries, Jewish migration was not driven solely by flight from persecution. Instead, they were running toward something entirely new. America’s founding fathers—some of whom counted Jews among their personal friends—believed in something greater than mere tolerance. They believed in liberty, religious and otherwise.
This belief in the agency of a people to choose their government proved transformative. For centuries, Jews had wandered and petitioned kings and emperors for permission to reside and to worship. In America, they encountered a radically different idea: that sovereignty resided not in rulers, but in the people themselves.
The Jews of the newborn nation were not a monolith. They were rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, men and women. But they shared a common heritage of exile and displacement—experiences that deepened their appreciation for the radical virtue of liberty from tyranny.
That is why the American cause spoke to Jews so profoundly. Phillips was by no means alone as a Jewish patriot. Some, like Francis Salvador of Charleston and Mordecai Sheftall of Savannah, Georgia, became political leaders in their communities and fought alongside their fellow patriots in the Continental Army. In Charleston, there were so many Jewish soldiers that contemporaries later nicknamed the unit the “Jew company.” Others—including Abigail Minis of Savannah and Haym Salomon of New York—financed provisions for patriot troops. Lieutenant Colonel David Salisbury Franks, of Quebec and Philadelphia, carried official American correspondence to Paris at the war’s end, serving in a diplomatic capacity for which he would never be fully reimbursed.
It wasn’t only that Jewish patriots helped shape the spirit of America; with little precedent, they also reshaped Judaism itself to mirror the spirit of the Revolution. In Philadelphia, the board of Mikveh Israel was overhauled. Traditionally appointed by existing leadership, its members were now elected by congregants. In keeping with the ethos of their new democracy, congregants selected a board composed of Jewish patriots drawn from across the colonies. Around 1782, when Jonas Philips returned from wartime service, they elected him president.
In the early years of the republic, Jewish Americans applied the lessons of the Revolution to help build a more perfect union. In 1787, Phillips petitioned the Constitutional Convention on behalf of the Jews of Philadelphia, urging the removal of a Christian religious test for public office. His efforts—part of the earliest struggle over religious liberty in the new republic—were not in vain. The principle he advanced would later make possible the public service of Americans of non-Christian faiths, from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Rather than patiently awaiting their fate in the new republic, revolutionary-era Jews shaped it. In so doing, they chose to become American.
It is astounding that this story remains largely absent from the history of Jews in America. In New York—the city home to the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel—the only mandatory chapter of Jewish history taught in schools centers on the Holocaust.
There is immense tragedy in Jewish history. But there is also profound hope. To tell the story of the first Jewish American patriots is not only to close a gap in our understanding of the nation’s founding, but to recognize the key role Jews have played in advancing American ideals from the very beginning. At a moment when virulent antisemitism once again plagues both the left and the right of American society—energized by stereotypes that cast Jews as outsiders or extractive figures—there is no better antidote than historical truth.
This coming year, as we reach an important milestone as a country, we are called more than ever to reflect on the rich and complex legacy of our republic. And as we light candles in memory of the ancient heroes who freed Jerusalem, we should also remember the forgotten Jewish patriots who helped light the path of America’s democracy.